Color Schemes in Your Work

Self explanatory.

Be it art based, or theme based, what type of coloring dynamics do you have with your characters and plot?

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Well, the first thing that comes immediately to mind is a fairly bizarre coincidence involving a species from my comics, the picilnk, who had literal Blue-and-Orange Morality - pretty much everything associated with them was orange, and they apparently considered the color blue to be evil. The reason this sticks out in my mind is that I created them well before ever becoming aware of TV Tropes - it is not a reference to the trope name.

I'll add more about my works later, but for now, here's a courtesy link to Color-Coded for Your Convenience, which has a lot of tropes that should be useful for reference here.

I use the color red a lot. The 154s in Project 154 (including Jack Clive of course) have red hair spliced from a Northern Cardinal.

As for the coloring style of Beowulf, I'm aiming for lots of color and intricate geometric designs in the clothes and other manmade objects. I also want to avoid using perfect greys as a bit of a challenge.

edited 22nd Sep '11 3:36:10 PM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

The people who will be serious trouble (for anybody) wear black. Matte black, not reflective. Reflective black is for posers.

...amusingly I'm in the process of subverting this badly for the first time, as a good number of the people who will be serious trouble are currently wearing white and gold.

Nous restons ici.

I made my magic peeeeenk.

The one time it's not pink, and is yellow, is there to tell you there is some seriously odd shit at work.

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I seem to like 5-6 main Hair Colors throughout my series. Red (includes pink), Black, Blue, Blond, and a tie for Green/Silver.

Worldbuilding wise, I like the colors blue, red, grey and green with variations thereof to describe scenery, weapons, and various other things.

Pre Wham Episode: sky blue, white, orange

Post Wham Episode: dark blue, grey, blood red

edited 22nd Sep '11 4:50:08 PM by dRoy

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

Green seems to be a popular color in my works. In Wordkeepers, protagonist Nick is associated with green things: He wears green clothes, and his "aura color" is green. Always a Hero has both Boysenberry and Cora; Boyse is green because he wears green clothes and is associated with earth colors (despite having Blow You Away powers), while Cora has a green staff gem and is allegedly Earth-affiliated. Her 11th-Hour Superpower is also green-colored. Angeline, the protagonist of Aa H's sequel, is also green-affiliated due to having a plant affinity, although she does not have Green Thumb powers as others believe of her. That book is even called Lit's Green Earth.

What's weird is that my favorite color is blue. I haven't done a "blue" book yet. Unless you count Wordkeepers, where each of the characters has an associated color, and Apollo's is blue. (The other two main characters, Ran and Alex, are white and yellow, respectively.)

"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada

~shrug~

It depends.

I'm fond of grays and blues, though. I tend to color-code things in my stories...

I am now known as Flyboy.

In my current WIP the viewpoint strongly associates bright colors with bad things due to the coding system used in his job — yellow with distress, orange with distress and injury, red with severe injury and unconsciousness, and blue with death. Someone unwittingly buys him a bright orange jacket, and things just kind of spiral downward from there.

In terms of character designs, I notice I tend to do a few things. For one, I notice that I seem to like high-contrast color combinations, or I'll use color schemes that are ironic in some sort of way. For example, Iudicium/Samara Amarante, who is basically a deity representing Judgment. For hair and skin, I have her as a Black and White Beauty. For her clothes, I also follow a black and white motif. The irony in it is that such a scheme would suggest Black-and-White Morality, but in reality she operates with Grey-and-Grey Morality- As the being that passes the final judgment when someone dies, she realizes everything is relative, that there's never a clear-cut good or evil.

I'm also very fond of the color combination of green and black.

As for non-symbolic color schemes, I just typically use whatever is realistic/appropriate or simply what looks right with the character. I won't use colors that don't look right with their skin/hair/eye color, and I try not to clash colors. The exception is, of course, if it's in-character for the character to dress that way.

I rarely go into the realm of improbable hair colors... Unless, of course, a character dyes it that color (For example, a quirk of a particular character of mine is dyeing his hair odd colors). The only exception to this is white hair, and is not used with human characters... Unless, of course, they dye it. In the same vein, I try to avoid abnormal eye colors, unless it's a non-human species or the person is wearing colored contacts.

Drifting away from characters and following motifs, it depends. On Earth or in other "natural" settings

, the colors are realistic for that world, taking into account things like their atmosphere, lifeforms, evolution, etc.. But with settings that are essentially outside our known universe, non-physical realms that technically don't even exist in a tangible form, it tends to reflect the psyche of whomever is seeing it. That is, appearance would depend on the narrator, and the colors and visuals would be symbolic of their inner workings.

“DAMMIT WHEN I HEAR 'SPACE CQC' ALL I CAN THINK OF IS BIG BOSS WITH A FISHBOWL ON HIS HEAD, STRANGLING AN ASTRONAUT OUTSIDE THE ISS."

Hmm, I've never really thought about this before . . .

When describing a character's body, or their inherent abilities (like Color-Coded Wizardry), I tend to use black, white, or dark red to signify something that my viewpoint character considers frightening (though some characters treat white as a friendly color, especially when I contrast it with black.) Brown is my safe, mundane color, dark blue is mildly exotic but intriguing, and green tends to be weird. On the rare occasions grey shows up, it's both ambiguous and really, really powerful. (Note that this is all a matter of the viewpoint character or society's perspective—I'm fond of Dark Is Not Evil.)

When I describe clothing, heroes tend to favor light shades, especially pale green. Antiheroes get black, and characters who're incredibly confident in their own goodness (not necessarily heroes) wear white. Out-and-out villains are likely to wear dark shades, though usually not black. I'm somewhat unusual in that I'm more likely to use light pink as a villainous color than a heroic one—I associate it with squashed mosquitoes, so I assign it to characters who have verminous or parasitic aspects. (Unlike body and abilities, clothing is chosen according to how a character views himself or herself, so it's more reliable in determining which characters are selfish or self-righteous.)

edited 23rd Sep '11 4:55:12 PM by feotakahari

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

...Dang, green and black are popular.

But, anyway, Stuck is also kinda focused on those two. Specifically #24fc00 (a.k.a. the color of Tre's shades on the cover over on the trope page).

As for everyone else, Nora's usually a bright pink-purple kind of color, while Grassy goes for yellow and Max bright red. Oh, and Todd usually goes for a darker, more blood-ish red, for some unclear reason.

oh, that's why I need this binary mind // ⌘

A lot of purple and black, a little too "emo", but since a lot of my stories are about whiny angsty teens, it makes sense

Black, white, and a little bit of gray, because that're the colors of Manifestations.

I just realized that both the Suenyaverse and the Wordkeepers-verse have a character who works at a school who uses magic to dye his hair odd colors. Although the Suenyaverse character, Professor Roy, is meant to come off as weird and a bit unsettling due to his obsession with freakishly garish colors (to the point of walking around with bright blue, green, and orange hair), with Cosmo, it's just sort of an indication that he's a chill and laid-back guy (since the rest of his color sense is normal). It helps that most of the time, his hair is just colored light blonde, making him look like a Dark Skinned Blonde.

edited 11th Oct '11 2:04:11 PM by FreezairForALimitedTime

"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada

"to dye"

—is shot—

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Flag colors

• White on blue for The Republic.
• Black on red for the The Federation/West Horde.
• White and purple on Gold for the theocratic kingdom.
• Black on brown for the subterranean confederacy of insectoid colonies.

edited 4th Oct '11 10:04:14 PM by Worlder

My protagonist has got tan skin, auburn/chestnut hair and brown eyes; it's supposed to be a fall color scheme. 2 fer 1 evoking nature and change, since he's about both. He also goes through this transformation that makes his eyes a bright, inhuman green, which evokes summer and also clashes with reddish tones.

A lot of my works are centres in a northern clime. As such I tend toward greys, blues and whites in terms of descriptions, though "dead grass" coloured is also popular. Part of the reason my fantasy can never be Heroic Fantasy is, even if I got the plot and characters right, the colour schemes would be all wrong.

So yeah, lots of muted greyed-in shades, all over the place.

The few times I've written in southern climes it was for a desert, and was all burnt reds and bleached out yellows and empty skies.

What I'm writing right now has two settings, one is my usual Canadian North by Any Other Name, the other one is shiny. I don't usually write shiny.

edited 9th Oct '11 7:51:00 PM by AwayLaughing

I like blue. My self-insert wears a lot of it, along with white and silver, and she lives near the ocean. My second-favorite character wears purple and is a pilot. The characters least like me wear warm colors, red and yellow and are pretty much landlocked.

Transparent, but I hope it works.

In Zaran il Legio I use a lot of grey colours. Most buildings are grey, the sky has dark clouds, the ground is dark volcanic rock. Then Zaran herself has white skin and wears black and bright purple (her father has white skin aswell, but wears dark, almost black armour so you can't really see it).

For Forgotten Lore I don't really have a specific colour scheme (I won't be drawing it myself anyway), altough I see it tending towards dark or muted colours. Zaran still has the white/purple/black combination as her "official colour scheme", while the Herald of the Outer Gods wears white and gold, altough his "true" colours are black and red.

Pretty much everything in Milo's story is green - it is set in a rainforest after all. I tend towards vibrancy in the various non-human races there, to mimic the colours that I loved in wildlife documentaries. Iridescent blues, emerald green, and bright yellow and red are frequent.

Another thing I've noticed is that I like unusual or inhuman eyes, whether it's in colour or shape.

Be not afraid...

Colour as a theme seems to run through my work on a subliminal level. Take, for example, the fact that whenever something really awful happens, the colour palette in my descriptions gradually seems to desaturate: Bright reds dull to brown, yellow turns sallow, greens and blues blur into minty grey.

Granted, this is far more pronounced in my mind's eye than in the actual writing, but if you pay attention it is there, consciously or not.

Why, yes it is... Thank you.

edited 10th Oct '11 12:26:35 PM by JHM

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

To saturate means the colors get more intense. Desaturate is what you want when the colors are less vibrant.