It's like paint-by-numbers, but you have to make up your own numbers.

Just a reminder: as always, these posts include spoilers. But you knew that, and if you were really worried, you wouldn't be reading these posts.

Above, you can see the basic sort of steps that a sheet of colour keys goes through. In this case, the colour progression almost matched the strip of photo reference I cobbled together. I do not feel as if that was 100% intentional. Maybe 65%.

Let's see, what did I learn during these?

I'm surprised at how much "grey" I used. I hardly ever make selections from the saturated side of the colour picker. I'm trying to think why that is. Part of it is beneficial, in that less-saturated colours convert to CMYK more directly (some bright, saturated colours cannot be represented using the CMYK printing process). But also, my method for colour picking involves a lot of trial-and-error, and during that process, I kept shifting toward muted colours.

…For the most part. I was also trying to save my really saturated, vibrant colours for intense, fantastical sections of the story.

Throughout, I tried to represent the "real world" using a straightforward palette, and all the images that represent DD's imagination are more vivid and subjective.

On BUBBLE (a graphic novel, it's out soon), I did all the line work and Natalie Riess did the colour. She occasionally used a trick I really liked, which was to use a "false colour" approach to punch some meaning into a particular panel. In the past, I generally stuck to making things the colours they were supposed to be (relatively speaking). I wanted to give this "false-colour" technique a shot.

And if you remember the sketch of the fountain with the tree growing all over it, I said I would put that into the book verbatim. I'm particularly happy with how it turned out in colour.

Oh, also, you can see in the trees above how I've added colour to the watercolour wash that I used for the foliage. I'm surprised at how well all the watercolour washes have worked out. Free texture! Huzzah!

In Other News…

Earlier this week, I was reading a Twitter thread by Emily Carmichael, a screenwriter I follow. As I did, I saw the words "Delilah Dirk" pop up in the periphery. Turns out, Emily has added Delilah Dirk to the list of screenwriting credits in her bio. She did so because she is writing the script for a Delilah Dirk feature film.

This was not news to me, but I have been assiduously not-mentioning it for fear of jinxing the project. It's exciting that we've got to the point where Emily is free to mention it in public.

Emily is awesome, and I feel very lucky that DD is in her hands!

(The aforementioned thread discusses the topic of heroes killing other characters, spun off a tweet from LUCA writer Jesse Andrews, who said, "i now have written three american movies and not one of them has a gun in it." Emily goes on to discuss how unnecessary it is for heroes to be knocking off their opponents, all points I couldn't agree more with. I've been watching some action movies lately and the Henchman carnage is not as easy to stomach as it used to be, for whatever reason. In DD & THE TURKISH LIEUTENANT, DD skewers some dudes, and the Agha skewers another, and since then, I have made a concerted effort to eliminate fatal violence. Like Emily says about the Borne movies, the stories don't suffer from the absence of enemy corpses.)

WHAT'S NEXT?

Flatting! Colour prep! Time to put some podcasts on and start colouring inside the lines.