December 2011
120 posts
Wonder Woman's Matthew Wilson gives his thoughts on coloring the book
Yesterday, I named Wonder Woman the top DC book for 2011 for female characters. The art on the book has a lot to do with the book’s success. But while I’ve spent a lot of time discussing Cliff Chiang’s pencils, mention should be made of Matthew Wilson’s coloring which has given the book a edgy feel and perfectly complements Chiang’s style. If this Wonder Woman feels bold, Wilson deserves a lot of the credit.
Wilson has posted some of his thoughts about how he colored the latest issue specifically the bar scene and it is fascinating reading. Here he discusses the technique he used:
I want to talk about a scene in Wonder Woman #4 that was set in a night club/bar and that presented two challenges that could be addressed with color. The first is that we have our group of characters split up, and in different parts of the club, and I knew that I could use color help the reader understand which part of the bar each character occupied. There are also quite a few panels with a lot of people drawn in them, and if I were to do my job poorly the art could flatten out and become hard to read. I had to make sure that I did a good job of separating planes (foreground, middleground, background) to properly show the depth of space in the club. In this case coloring different areas of the club with different color schemes solved both problems. These different colored “pools” of light include the blue-green seating area, the yellow bar area, the red stage area, and the crowd being a transition between red (stage) and blue-green (seating area) ending up a pink-ish/purple.
Here’s how his technique was used on the first show of Diana.
Here’s the page with the original colors:
Wonder Woman is lit by red-ish light but I needed her (and the crowd) to separate visually from the guys on stage. So I took the red from the stage, and the blue-green from the rest of the club and met in the middle (sort of) with pinks and purples…
He also writes about Cliff Chiang’s direction for the pages including what the band should sound like.
This is really fascinating! I love reading the thoughts of artists, colorists, and everyone inbetween.
Why high fantasy and crime dramas don't mix.
Last night I had a dream about Rizzoli and Isles 2x15, even without seeing the episode.
It turned out that Maura’s mother was actually part of the Wild Hunt, and brought her fellow hunters into our realm when Paddy Doyle was taken down. She wanted to wreak havoc on those who hurt her beloved (and her half-fey daughter), but Maura bargained with the Wild Hunt to keep Dean and Jane safe… in exchange for serving the Wild Hunt for ten years.
The bargain was struck right as Jane showed up to try talking to Maura, and the Wild Hunt vanished - along with Doctor Isles.
Paddy Doyle’s rivals started dropping like flies, but not by ice pick. A lone arrow was found in each corpse.
The last thing I saw before I woke up was Maura Isles in elven armor, with bloody streaks drawn on her face in a pattern, before she slid a helmet on.
Too much high fantasy for this girl, I think.
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed... →
district-4-tribute.tumblr.com
Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (IN FRENCH)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor HugoI’ve read a hell of a lot more than 6, and most by choice and not becuase my teachers made me.
This is not, by the way, a BBC claims you only read 6 thing like everyone things it is. This was posted in the Guardian in 2007, and they never mentioned ‘You’ve only read six’.
This is actually 100 books we can’t live without. And they’re right.
There are some of these that made me passionately happy I’d read them. Others made me think, “Well, that’s <X amount of time> that I’ll never get back.” The majority of both categories, I read on my own, not for an academic requirement. All of them I’m glad I read — even the ones I hated or that bored me — because now when someone makes reference to lines from them and hopes that I will understand the vast subtext behind what they’re saying, I usually do.
Pick ten you haven’t read. Read them. This is how you become educated: through books.
… Is it bad that Lord of the Flies and Heart of Darkness are two of my favorite books?
