Tried out some colour keys for the murky underwater scene and sickly hospital room today. I took inspiration from Nathan Fowkes’ way of working. He starts with abstract thumbnails and just lays in a few colours in each composition. I think it leads to cohesion and also greater contrast, and it definitely looks stunning to me.

I think I wouldn’t necessarily do these thumbnails unless I was in the early stage of the process – say, if composition was already finalised, maybe I would just follow the composition and do a few colour options. But painted thumbnails are a great way of freely experimenting with mood and contrast, and the best thing is that you may even surprise yourself with a solution you hadn’t thought of before.

Certainly if I’d just gone straight to drawing the layout and colouring in, I wouldn’t play around with the hints of bright, saturated pinks/oranges/yellows/teals (which I hope are suggestive of sunlight streaming in). If I have time in a future project to play around at this stage, I certainly would.