Colour or B&W

The more I've been thinking about the colour I want to use the more I realise how important it is that I need to get it right because whatever colour scheme I go for has to play throughout the film going through all the emotions that the character goes through.

At first I began with flesh tones with deep reds and browns because I assumed I'd have to use this so that I can express the deep anger and exploding frustration through deep intense reds that'll pop out from his cheeks and lips.

However I realise that is not necessarily true. I can express that emotion in whatever colour I want because the expression will do that job for me. But I am aware that I cant rely solely on the character's facial expression to do all the work. The colours need to fit in with his face.

I thought, in that case, why not forget about the colours and go with black and white if I'm worried about getting the balance between colour representation and emotion wrong. Here I made a study in black and white with a tinge of blue so that the image appears a tad more richer.

There is more of a mood and an atmosphere with the black and white and the contrast is very strong, which is a problem because I would have to keep this fairly consistent throughout the film which means the tonal range will look the same for anger as it would do for sadness for example. This will look quite monotonous which is not what I want and as I said before I cant rely on the expression of the character to save it for me.

I went back and made a few more studies and decided on something. I played around with these two colour schemes and extracted certain colours from it and combined them together.

Along with combining my understanding how colours work in cartoons to depict night scenes in the Ian Miller cartoon that I was so fond of, I was able to come up with a colour scheme that could potentially work.

I ended up with this:

This colour scheme depicts the skin tone, the proper red lips, and the dark atmospheric evening setting which I wanted. This colour scheme also allows me to play with them a lot more freely in photoshop to create colours that harmoniously sit the expressions the character will make.

I reckon I'll go with the one on the right because that way I can show with strong powerful light sources that shine on his features. I can keep the powerful contrasts of the black and white image as before in this way.