Colour

 Usually in my work I tend to use a lot of colours and so in this project I want to use a tamer selection of colours or no colour at all.

  Colour without us realising can affect our behaviour and how we perceive things. The oddest thing is that every culture perceives colour differently, in western Europe red may mean bold and passion but in India it marks purity at weddings, yellow in England may be reassuring while in France it signals jealousy and in china masculinity. In nature colour is used to attract mates or hide from predators.

-http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01q8qq1  15 minute radio documentary, Feeling Colour, first broadcast Wednesday 30 January 2013, accessed 05/03/2014

 As my nursery rhyme is based on the sea I picked blue to based my colour selection.

  I found the one of the covers of the books I had looked at had an interesting cover that caught my eye. The cover of Blankets consists of blues and white, I really like how this cover stands out and only uses simple colour rather than full colour. I wanted to try using spot colour similar to the cover of Blankets, and tried to only use the colour blue for the sea because this is an important part of my rhyme and makes its vast size compared to the boat stand out. This experiment shows that using spot colour makes the boat stand out through the mass of pattern that is the sea. It works well as it helps separate the pattern of the sea from the boat and moon.

Blankets cover

Black and white

Black and white images can work just as well as seen in comics, the book that I found uses black and white images successfully was Blankets, the images in this comic use the white space and line to create shades of grey to add tone to the image. The black and white images in this book are striking and stand out due to the contrast. I tried to create images that stood out and used not just black and white gradient but grey tones as well. My first experiment was made to help me understand text, mixing text with images as even though my project is wordless is still something I need to understand before disregarding it. This image is black and white as that was the brief but this meaning I had to think about contrast and how I could make my paper cut style more simple. I further experiment with this in my second image as this is wordless and from my rhyme, adding in grey scales gave me more to use and this didn't work as well as the experiment before because I gave myself to much to work with and so then didn't think about space as much as I did with the black and white image.

Ruff ideas for black and white image

Experiment 1

Experiment 2

  

Tone and spot colour

  On this comic page I used spot colour and tone together as I realised that I hadn't considers the white space that I would have left on the page, and this lessons the impact of blue and white. Also this story is supposed to be set at night and you cant really tell with so much white making the image seam as if in day. Though the combination of how the hatching works with the blue and the pattern used for the waves, I find the softer tones of the watercolours grey to work better because it makes the image softer and more suited to how the words of the rhyme, using the association of the soft grey tone with merriment and relaxation. 

After changing the background to be black I found the blue and white worked better as the white was less dominate but this makes the hatching on the boat for the tone stand out more and this isn't what I was trying to do.