Captain's Colour Scheme

 06/12/21 - Week 10

To prepare for texturing my character this week, I needed to finalise on the colour scheme. Using my initial mood boards and ideas, I tried to pick colours that would help the instant recognition of a fisherman that also made each part of my character stand out on it's own for a clear read.

This ended up being a lot harder than I first thought and I couldn't find the right balance between light and dark colours on the clothing. I recognised that a lot of the reference I had included bright, vibrant colours as this is very important at sea for a multitude of reasons. The high-vis fisherman jacket is very iconic so making this something that stands out was very important, though this would drastically reduce my options for adding vibrancy and colour variation without harsh clashes.

I first started with this, this was the sort of colours I was originally thinking of and I really liked the idea of the yellow jacket with ginger hair as they would work well together. Though already I was finding problems with balance. Here, though the jacket, hair and rope works well, I found it hard to start adding in more colour variation in the rest of the clothing as it would start to drown out the yellow and orange, or take away from these important parts of the design.

 

My second idea was to sort of go off of one of the reference images I had that had a character from a pre-existing game that was also ocean/sailor based. I did like the jacket and the hair again here, though I felt pretty set on somehow getting ginger hair to work. The orange being included in the jacket was appealing, however it made it difficult to get more dark colours included from the dark of the hair, as this would just make nothing stand out apart from the jacket and perhaps rope.

After getting some help and feedback, I ended up with something a lot closer to what I felt was going to work. Increasing some of the vibrancy and getting some more tones in really helped in the end. The vibrancy in the jacket made it stand out a lot more but the other colours I was choosing was still letting them speak. However, I still felt that I could improve from here.

Just to test some things out and with some more feedback I decided to try a green for the waders and jacket. I just felt that this didn't shout ocean fishing as much as the yellow or orange jacket, however. But I do think that this sort of scheme could have been viable if my captain was a river or lake fisher as this sort of colour is much more typical of that.

Going back to the previous ideas, I tweaked some things and made it a bit more my own and I felt these colours I picked here were pretty good. I still feel like they aren't perfect but during some feedback I was told to maybe play about with adding some variation on each piece of clothing, I didn't have enough time to test this out today but I will definitely add this in to my textures as this will add another layer of detail and separation. One of the reasons why I chose this is because of the colour of the ropes, they stand out from each other and are very alike colours that I have in my reference.

Now that I have decided on a colour scheme I can move on to texturing so that my character will be ready to be rigged and skinned soon. The colours is something that I struggled with since designing the character but doing it quickly in marmoset really helped me to work it out with a bit more ease.