Jubilee Pool - Character Colour Palette

After making the character designs, and realising they didn't fit with our backgrounds, I decided to do some tests to see if I could make them work. I didn't want to get rid of our designs, so I kept the same designs but focused on changing the colours and textures. The backgrounds are very blue with monochrome texturing, so I looked the complimentary colour of blue, which is orange, for the characters. Originally, I tried to keep fairly realistic tones, but as you can see from these tests (pictured below), they didn't really work. Once I tried the sepia version it started to work a lot better, so I pushed the colours and used the same brush from the background texturing for the character texturing. This really helped blend the two, whilst the orange vs blue tones made the characters stand out.

I then applied these tones to the lineup, so I could make sure I found the right tones for each character compared to each other. I wanted the cat to be the darkest as he is the antagonist, and then I needed Mark to be the second brightest since he is the main character. The other characters are background characters, so I made them similar colours and lighter than the rest of the characters.

I then did some tests of this colouring in TVPaint to see if we could actually do it and if it would take too much time. I managed to find a way to do it quite efficiently, and it still looks true to the Photoshop versions. The first version (on the right) took longer because I was figuring out how to do it. However, the second version was much quicker (on the left) since I had worked out what tools on TVPaint could cut corners for elements such as creating the base colour from the line art/sketch. The two tests look identical, but the one on the left took half the time of the one on the right.

We then decided to make some changes to the cat character, which Robin redesigned and created a turnaround for. His turnaround included the old colours, so I took it into TVPaint and applied the new colouring as a test to see if it worked with a full character, and if the process was quite quick. The process did take a little longer than expected, but after the first two figures I got a lot quicker. I think the design and colouring finally works, and we are happy with using this design in the final piece.