Colour & Tone

I tried adding some colour to the sample version of my comics, and as much as it's clearer to see, I feel it looks much worse. My ability with colour isn't great, especially because I approached this comic as a black and white manga-esque style. I need a lot more understanding and practice understanding colour for future projects. For the sample version I will stick with the black and white only. Below you'll see more colour experiments for the full version.

The original final for a double page spread is a very potent use of black and white. I approached the comic with this intention, but I'm going to look at some use of colours.

Here I started inserting what colours I imagined would work but they really didn't look very nice, which is why I stopped before finishing. This doesn't portray the message and feeling I wanted and again, I know this is likely due to my lack of experience and understanding of colour, but either way it's not what I want my work to include.

Looking at a complete overlay here. It makes the tone easier on the eyes but there isn't a single colour, tone or opacity that I could find that helped the image at all. Moving on.

Here I've found what I feel is exactly what I wanted my comic to look like. The addition of the grey-scale has added so much more depth to the image, and even though it lacks colour it still tells a much richer story than without the tone at all. For now I will settle for this, but I'll explore below adding colour again.

I quite like the look of a silk-screen effect here, it adds something different to the image. Perhaps a colour all over like this could reflect a certain theme or mood but for this comic I feel keeping it grey-scale and leaving the colour up to the interpretation of the reader is more appropriate.

This is a very rough colour sample here but I very much like it; not for my final comic though. This Risograph-esque effect packs a powerful punch and delivers quite a violent message which definitely reflects the nature of the scene, but I feel it would work more as a one off print or page that perhaps has one very large, very striking image.
Replacing all the grey-scale toning with strong red definitely works when keeping the black and the white, but for this style to work I'd need to approach the piece with that initial idea in mind from the beginning. I will definitely use this in the future but for this project, I will stick with the grey-scale toning.