Thursday, December 06, 2007

Color Theory 9 - BG Color: Donald's Diary

I'm a sucker for great color and it's very rare when you find it in cartoons.

Disney has had amazing color in many of their cartoons, and I would have been doing posts on them earlier, but unfortunately most of the remastered dvds of Disney cartoons have changed all the colors and contrasts to make them appeal to more "modern tastes".I finally found a digital copy of one of my favorite color cartoons and here it is. Yeah, the colors have been pumped up, but I took down the saturation a bit to get them back to the way I remember them.
These colors are very original and intelligent. There is an overall scheme to the color ideas in the cartoon.
Most of the colors are mixed down with a milky gray.
There are areas of related colors in the scenes-like the yellowish area next to the grayish area in the street pan above.

All the colors in Daisy's room are related, but not monochromatic which would make it look dull. Brown is the main color, but some browns are reddish, some are yellowish, some pinkish and each have different percentages of mixes.The rendering technique is very rough and fast. This is pretty unusual for Disney. It would look sloppy if it was rendered realistically this way and with the typical cartoon colors, but these colors are so unusual and striking that you don't really notice until you look close.


A nice balance of textured areas next to flatter areas.


These park scenes knock me out!
Nothing is the "logical" color. No blue skies or water. Even the greens are very unorthodox.


I will post more from this cartoon in a few days, but I'm in a rush to go do a CG movie pitch if you can believe that...