Hopefully, you have never had the misfortune of reading comments saying that the coloring of your comic makes peoples eyes bleed. If you have, sorry. Most of the time, inexperience or ignorance, not to be confused with stupidity, causes people to make bad color choices. A basic knowledge of color theory can help you choose colors that work well together.

PART ONE: The three attributes of color

The are three attributes that make a color what it is, hue, saturation, and brightness.

Hue is basically what the color is. There are three primary hues, red, blue, and green (aka RGB). Mixing red and blue gets magenta, blue and green, cyan, and green and red, yellow.

Colors that are opposite of each other are complementary colors. Colors that are next to each other are adjacent colors. Remember this because it is going to be crucial to a few of the other points made here.

Saturation is a little harder to describe than hue. The best definition I can remember is that saturation is similar to how pure a color is. A high saturation color will appear bright and vibrant. A low saturation color, however, will appear drab and even faded. A color with no saturation is a gray, a 50-50 mix of two complementary colors.

Brightness is best described using grays, yes, not hues, grays. Pure white has no black in it and reflects 100% of all light. Pure black has no white and absorbs 100% of all light. Mixing white and black in equal parts will give you a 50% gray. Adding white of black to 50% gray will shift the brightness up or down the scale.

Now, let's take the above and add color to it. A pure fully saturated hue takes the place of a 50% gray. Adding white to that color will make a tint. Adding black to that same color will make a shade.

PART TWO: Basic theory

Complementary colors bring each other out, that's why colors on opposite ends of the color of the color wheel tend to make for loud, aka highly visible, patterns. This is what often causes the eye bleeding comics. Ways to avoid this are have one hue used for the main color and its complement as an accent color. Another is to use a desaturated version of one or both colors. The third and final way is avoid using complementary colors.

Adjacent colors are a way to unify a character or image. Adjacent colors fall under two categories, warm and cool. Warm colors tend to be on the red side of the color wheel. Cool colors are typical on the blue side of the color wheel. Green and Violet are borderline cases with there "warmth" being determined by what colors they are used with. The main problem with using just adjacent colors is it makes things appear to be monochromatic.

PART THREE: Color Associations

Okay, last thing. Certain color schemes and colors have associations with them. A good example is red is evil and blue is good. I'm just going list a few as that makes it easier to go through.

Red: fire, evil, love, passion, energy, Hell
Blue: water, good, calm, sadness
Green: nature, earth, good (again), envy
Purple: royalty, richness
Yellow: bubbly, care-free, summer
White: purity, chastity
Black: evil, darkness (personality wise)

Blue/Gold (yellow) or Purple/Red or Blue/white: Royalty, Nobility, The Church
Any Nations National colors: Patriotism
Red/Black: evil, Anti-hero, just plain cool
Pink/Black: creepy Lolita girls (j/k)
Blue/Black: Stealth, antihero, just plain cool
Earth tones: nature (Note: think trees and dirt (All varieties of dirt) and you basically have earth tones)


There you go hope this helps you in comic making.