Banana Phone

Er, Banana Stand.

I've been having a hell of a time trying to figure out the color palette for this one. It was an illustration assignment - create a narrative image with a man, a woman, a dog, a banana, and a giraffe.

I struck an idea I liked after two rounds of sketches, and took it through a final sketch and an inking pass fairly quickly:



And then I flatted in a basic grayscale hierarchy:



But after that I got a little lost. I tried a few different methods of adding color, all of them resulting in hideous, mind-bending failure. Finally, I hit on method that seemed to work - I took each grayscale level and colored in just the gray value, giving the foreground the highest contrast and the background the lowest. Then I colorized the foreground in yellow and the background in blue, which gave me a simple, directly-opposite color palette with a readymade value structure. Finally, I tweaked the forergound colors, slightly naturalizing them while keeping them nice and warm so they still pop forward. Here is a picture:



I'm not sure about leaving the background just blue, but I'm having difficulty messing around with the palette the same way I did in the foreground without everything in the background starting to pop forward and confuse the picture.

At any rate, now you know what those giraffe facts were for.