Chris Ware Colour

Chris Ware Colour

In his illustrations Chris Ware uses a colour palette that is chosen very carefully. His use of colour stands out when looking at his comics. He uses very dull colours for the backgrounds of his work, with slightly brighter tones for the characters. The dark and dreary tonal choice, is mainly because of the content of his work. His stories are depressing and don’t tend to have a happy ending. These quite muted colours help to showcase this mood he is going for.

Here is an example of his work in "Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth". The tones are so dull and everything is really muted. But because his whole colour scheme is like this then it works really well.

Here is a piece of work I produced in the past; because I drew it with black bordering lines I felt it slightly resembled Chris Ware’s work style. I then went back and changed all the colours to something I feel that fitted his style even more:

 

Working back into previously finished work helped me really think about the colours I wanted to use. I feel that I could have muted the colours a lot more in the first place when I produced that work, and that the final outcome worked better as a piece of work than the original.

References:

Ware, C. (2003) Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth. London: Jonathan Cape.

Bibliography:

Wolk, D. 2012. Insidethe box – New York Times. [Online]. [Accessed 6 October 2016]. Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/books/review/building-stories-by-chris-ware.html

Heer, J. 2014. Chris Ware, The art of comics No. 2 – Paris Review. [Online]. [Accessed 6 October 2016]. Available from: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6329/chris-ware-the-art-of-comics-no-2-chris-ware

Ware, C. (2012) Building stories. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Bartual, R. 2012. Towards a panoptical representation of time and memory: Chris ware, Marcel Proust and Henri Bergsons “pure duration”. [Online]. [Accessed 7 October 2016]. Available from: http://sjoca.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/SJoCA-1-1-Article-Bartual.pdf

Ware, C. (2003) Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth. London: Jonathan Cape.

Bennett, J. Jackson, C. 2015. Graphic Whiteness and the lessons of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan. [Online]. [Accessed 7 October 2016]. Available from: http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v5_1/bennett-jackson/

Cape, J. 2001. Jimmy Corrigan the smartest kid on earth – The guardian. [Online]. [Accessed 7 October 2016]. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jul/21/biography.highereducation

Rayburn, D. (2004) Chris Ware. London: Laurence king Publishing Ltd

Sinclair, M. 2015. The New Yorker animates its latest Chris Ware cover. [Online]. [Accessed 7 Octover 2016]. Available from: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/the-new-yorker-animates-its-latest-chris-ware-cover/