u/Cutegirl920fire

EDIT: PLEASE BE CLEAR AND CONCISE WHEN ANSWERING. I'm autistic, I struggle with understanding stuff sometines. r/ExplainItLikeIm5 if you have to.

I'd been loathing coloring for some time now. I find it more tedious to figure out the values and keeping things from getting muddy with my textures + hatching and other shit than only using black and white. It doesn't help that people keep telling me to do X and Y with the colors and whatnot. Besides it being annoying at times, said advice is often terrible at being considerate for dark hair and skin, which sucks for someone whose characters are in grounded settings where they're going to mainly have those traits. I'm heavily considering just making all of my comics B&W so I don't have to bother with colors and only save them for like character refs in case an artist wants to draw them in color.

However, there is a specific project that would be hindered if I did it in B&W. And that project is my Squid Game fan comic.

The canon Squid Game show uses bright, saturated colors to emphasize the twisted childhood imagery it has going on. Ranging from the contrast between the green tracksuit-wearing players and the masked pink guards working in the games to adding to the whimsy the sets have which makes the violence that happen on them more jarring in an intentional manner. I have included some image stills of the show for context, they start on slide 5.

I want the comic to match the feel and atmosphere of Squid Game as much as possible (please no "canon is just a suggestion, you don't have to follow everything it does" type comments, this is what I want for my comic and the "artists should do whatever they want" mindset should apply there). And that includes the colors. If everything was in black and white, then the twisted childhood imagery contrast and subverted whimsy wouldn't hit as hard.

In fact, there's a specific plot point represented by character design that wouldn't make much sense if there was no color. My comic's protagonist wears a green jacket unlike the other players who all wear blue in my take on Squid Game, which is set in the US. Besides the green jacket being literally one of the OG canon player jackets (context TL;DR, Squid Game 3 spoilers incoming, >!the MC is an aged up version of Baby 222. She has been allowed to keep her jacket - which was originally her mom's, who was a player in OG Squid Game - in the new games for make sure the audiences that tuned in for Baby 222's return could recognize her as Baby 222!<), the fact it's a different color also highlights how the MC is pretty much an outsider to almost everyone else in the games because she's one of the very few players who aren't American citizens since she spent her life in another country and only ended up in the American games because she was a tourist that ended up derailing from her trip after being promised info on her bio parents if she played. If the comic was B&W, then the contrast between the MC's jacket and other players' jackets would be like "oh her jacket is lighter than the other jackets", which wouldn't effectively convey the symbolism. For context, I have included the jacket designs which are on slides 9-10 (there's some Squid Game 3 spoilers on slide 9)

I think by now y'all can see why I don't want to do this comic in B&W despite my distaste for coloring. Yet, I'm not sure how to make coloring actually fun for me. I have received suggestions on doing monochromatic colors instead, but I'm not sure how well that would work considering that Squid Game does use a whole bunch of colors for their aesthetic that I'm trying to faithfully replicate in my comic. What am I supposed to do here?

I'd been looking for horror books that have twisted childhood imagery and motifs, but the only one I know of is Playground by Aron Beauregard. However, that book is personally too much for my limits, so I'm looking for other suggestions.

So I had someone off site suggest to use a different texture when coloring hair in my artwork because they thought it was murking up the details.

I personally disagree with this because I use the same texture for coloring everything that isn't clothes, concrete, and metal and it all looks fine to me. But, it wouldn't hurt to try nonetheless. For context, I use the exact same brush for everything when it comes to coloring, I just use different versions of that brush that have their own textures and such. A couple other people suggested different textures (B and C). However, even after trying them out, I'm not sure how well those textures mesh with the rest of my art style. Maybe it's my autistic ass that takes forever to get used to change, but B and C don't really look harmonious with the rest of my art.

So, which of these brush textures works best for not just coloring hair but also meshes the best with my art style?