Colouring Style Experiments 2

 I recently started watching JoJo's Bizarre Adventure thanks to my flatmates, and it's one of the craziest yet greatest things I've watched for a while. One of the things I love the most in the ridiculously exaggerated muscles and face details, and the crazy colours and scenes it has.

I thought that it would be fun to do a couple of silly sketched from it, but then I thought that I might as well try to add some colour to them.

I didn't want to go too crazy just because I'm still not that comfortable with colouring more normal things, but I still wanted to have fun with it. I didn't have many ideas by way of a background because I really draw them half of the time anyway, so I made a lot of odd shapes on PS and used different layer types to make some weird effects. I went a bit crazy on the saturation at first, and it still felt weird having the shadows a deep red, so I put a layer of purple over the image as well to make it work with the background and to lessen the contrast. I actually really like how it came out, even if I am used to a lot more contrast, and I decided to leave it there before I either ruined it or made it go back to more of a usual boring colouring style that I'd be tempted into doing.

I did a second one based off of another character in the show, but this time I kept the contrast. It doesn't look quite a crazy, but I do like the defined black lines along with the block colour shading. It was interesting trying to adapt to a more JoJo-like style, but I had a lot of fun especially with the bodies. I would definitely be tempted to do more of these, but also maybe finding a better compromise on contrast and saturation of the image first, because the colours aren't really that JoJo-ish in the end.

For the latest one I picked characters who always have great poses for a bit of extra fun.  I toned down the background a lot, using mostly the characters' repeated patterns as the main background bit and adding a few other shapes to make it more interesting. I tried to avoid outlines for the most part, just to see how simple I could make it otherwise. I still needed lines in parts, but I tried to incorporate them much more into the shading and make it fit in better. I added a white outline again to make the characters stand out from their background, which I think definitely works best. I do like the vector kind of look I achieved with the jacket on the left character that I did with the pen tool in Photoshop, although it might be worth trying out Illustrator if I want to do more things like that. I do enjoy line art though, so I will probably do more of that again in the future. These have all been fun to do though, and have helped me to think more about colours and different things when drawing.