Roxxy Powers Up

 

Slashjack

 

Jairn Summons

 

Wings of Grace

 

I still haven't really come up with an actual plot for Strange Shades. At this point, I think I'm just going to keep it as an art gimmick and keep doing the occasional character or scene drawing until either a story finally emerges, or maybe it'll just stay an art piece that one may eventually be able to interpret some tale from. Not sure if I ever described the plans for of the power layouts, but each color is supposed to equate to a power.

Primary Colors: Red equates to physical enhancement, Blue to telekinesis/energy blasts, and Yellow to summoning creatures.

Secondary Colors: Green summons energy objects (usually some kind of weapon or tool), Orange enabled mental enhancement for creating gadgets, and Purple I haven't decided yet.

Tertiary Colors: Pink would be empathic powers, Brown I'm not sure yet.

Shades: White and Black and Grey don't manifest powers, but bold and pastel variations of the main colors might alter the way the powers function slightly.

Roxxy vs Rabbit

 

Strange Shades still flits across my consciousness now and then. Here's Roxxy battling a rabbit-person from another world-fragment.

Strange Shades World Map?

 

I drew these a while ago, but realized I never posted them.

All this time later, I still have zero clue what Strange Shades actually is, storywise. No real sense of setting, or characters, or narrative, just the art gimmick and a couple of designs.

I do know that the series is supposed to take place in a universe without color, and for some reason, there are humans in it, and while they have always been able to see color, it just didn't exist there, until the Colors of Power arrived and imbued random people with fabulous superhuman abilities. What exactly this other universe is like, I can't say.

In an effort to just throw ideas at the wall, I doodled these maps, thinking about the setting actually being another Pocket Dimension idea, maybe a solar system sized reality with a single sun, and the scattered remnants of megastructures and planetoids hovering throughout. These maps indicate that Strange Shades may actually take place on the fragments of a shattered Niven Ring (see the Ringworld  series by Larry Niven for the defining example). This could explain a number of things about the setting... or just be a completely random factoid that doesn't mean anything. Who can say?

That said, I've always loved fantasy maps and alternate cosmologies and megastructure designs, seeing the different configurations worlds can take. If I ever actually manage to do Strange Shades, I probably will set it here, if for no other reason than it would just be pretty interesting.

Roxxy in Rain

 

Roxanne

Gotta love that 80s punk rock anime hair. :P

Finally settled on a name for this lady. Still not sure if she's going to see any real use.

Colors of Power: Fight

I'm still giving the Colors of Power idea some thought. Might go with the title Strange Shades.

Colors of Power

I may have more to say about it later, but as of now, I'm not sure this idea is going anywhere.

Part of what got me drawing again recently is the desire to try my hand at a web comic. Believing my skills to be sub-par, and also not wishing to spend several days on a single page, I tried to come up with an art gimmick that would let me create and post pages at a reasonably quick speed.

The idea was to do a simple, black-and-white comic set in a world that was literally, in-universe, a black and white world. However, recently, a strange phenomenon has occurred in this reality, causing some people to manifest superhuman powers. The gimmick is that whenever a superhuman uses their powers, there is an accompanying splash of color to go with it.

I'm still pretty raw on the concept, no real story formed yet, and I'm not entirely settled on how the colors should line up to the powers. I have notes written up, but I don't really want to clutter this post with too much text.

While I don't think this "comic" is going to manifest, especially as I'm already getting more confident in doing full-color work, I still like some of these sketches.