Colorfully Setting The Mood

When I began planning to create a web comic, one of the early style decisions I had to address was whether or not I wanted to do a black and white “classical newspaper” look or whether I wanted to go to full color. My background and love of animated cartoons helped me to lean toward full on color. In cartoon making, color is an integral component used for setting the mood, so to just do a black and white comic strip seemed, to me, to be very limiting. The trade off being a significant amount of additional work in producing each strip, which is no trivial matter when working on a tight schedule and with frequent deadlines. But I felt that colorful mood setting panels would be a huge plus for my storytelling. An important creative note is that if your comic strip idea is more of a random gag per strip and not a mixture of humor and story, then you might not find setting a visual mood to be that significant.

Bug Pudding is a satire and an adventure. Early on as I began to introduce the characters and the world of Tuberville Georgia, I wanted to present a very colorful and “fantasy-like” rural atmosphere.

As the story has progressed, the atmosphere of the strip has been gradually shifting to foreshadow the changing mood. It was still bright and sunny but occasionally a subtle change was injected.

The blue skies still prevail but the other background colors began to be muted. Even the grass started to turn more toward warmer shades.

Then as I began the more mysterious part of the adventure as Monroe stumbles into the Beauregard Bug Bombs testing range, a more pronounced mood shift has begun.

The fantasy world also has a more Gothic and malevolent side which is set up by the purple vapor clouds and the darker lighting of recent strips.

It’s a pastoral fantasy world moving into a direct collision course with a more veiled and threatening world of evil; all being reflected in the colorful mood setting backgrounds. Yes, adding color to a comic strip is a lot of extra work but it adds a lot dimensionally to the cartoonist’s tool set.