As I am working on defining my particular drawing style, I’ve been noticing that many webcomic artists use a very particular color palette that helps differentiate and define their comic. As I try to define what I might want my own webcomics to look like, I decided to compile a sheet of all my favorite webcomic’s color palettes. I thought I’d share it here in case anyone else was interested. Disclaimer: this is not an extensive list of every single color ever used in every single one of their webcomics, but it is enough to give me a good idea of their color palette.
These are all webcomic’s that I follow or have followed and I highly recommend all of them. Most of them can either be found on the Webtoon app or the TinyView app but some have their own websites such as The Oatmeal.
Some of them like Art by Moga and Strange Planet by Nathan Pyle have, what seem to me, very clear color palettes. Interestingly enough, these are also the two comics that use something other than pure black for their line work. I recently experimented with this for the first time while drawing a character from The Book of Mistakes by Corinna Luyken and I really liked it – I feel that it adds an extra layer of interest. Perhaps that’s why they have such clearly defined color palettes? Any color looks good with a black line but not every color looks good with brown line work or a deep blue-pink line.
Many of the webcomics use black and white almost exclusively and use color as just an accent. It also appears that many of them just use whatever color best fits the comic they happen to working on at the time although most of the time they do lean more towards a certain saturation (i.e. more pastels or more bright colors).
Personally, I can see how a defined color palette could be quite freeing but I can also see how it would be restricting. So the moral of the story is: do what you want and what you like the best because if you don’t like the colors you are working with, you won’t actually enjoy drawing.
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