Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

Well, firstly thanks for reading! Hope I can keep entertaining you with it. There a few methods to make your characters stand out, but two of the biggest are that of silhouette and colour.

If you can understand what a character is doing by their silhouette, it makes the pose ‘readable’, and the motivation and acting of the character that much clearer. It’s very important to have strong, clear posing in animation, so I try to apply it in my comic as well. It can tell you what a character is doing, but it can also tell you how they feel.

The second is colour; the current backgrounds are predominantly blue. When I shade the characters I use a sepia for the tonal values, but I also designed RGB’s latest outfit with this in mind. Orange and blue are on opposite sides of the colour wheel, so it makes the character stand out. I did the same thing in the previous with Madras; the interior of the House of Paint is a green turquoise, while Madras has a scarlet pink colour scheme.

Also occasionally breaking the frame like this helps to bring the character out, but it’s best to use it sparingly. You also have to be careful that it doesn’t disorientate the reader or break the flow of the page; having character popping out of the frames tends to drag the eye towards it, so I always hesitate before doing it.