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.

Cliff noted that the music should feel angry, so I picked red for the stage area. It seemed like a good idea to carry over that red to the background of the last panel where Wonder Woman is angrily stabbing Strife’s hand with the broken glass…

Here’s the original and the final of that dramatic page:

There’s more so make sure to click through.