Colour Study - Macross Plus (Patreon)

I'm on a quest to learn more about colour and one of the ways to do that is to do studies of compositions I really like!

As a youth, I was obsessed with a series called Macross Plus. It's a short OVA in the Macross (Robotech) universe, which I was never more broadly interested in. Macross Plus is on its surface a robots fighting series, but it has a lot of themes about identity and memory and also AI which even as a youth really captivated me. 

They would show this series sporadically on Teletoon in the middle of the night and I would always stay up to watch it when it ran. Recently I got myself the DVDs and started rewatching them. One thing that really struck me is that the use of colour in this series is very strong so I wanted to spend some more time studying it. 

This scene is not really representative of the whole series, it's from a concert by the "AI" idol Sharon Apple. This freeze-frame shot always sticks out in my memory so I wanted to spend some time dissecting it. 

The goal here wasn't a 1:1 reproduction of the whole image, but to really dissect the colour blocks and how they work together. I didn't sample any colours until the very end when I was checking my work. 

On the left you can see the blobs sampled from the reference image, and on the right are my sampled blobs. It's not a night-and-day difference but I do notice that my samples are more vibrant than the original, and I wonder whether that's due to my perception being a bit amped up or just the grainy/low-res quality of the reference. The black and white version is a "value check" which I think turned out ok (I want to have a range of values that "read" clearly)

Anyway you'll probably hear more from me about this series because the colour and light in it is really good!!! If you want to watch it some of it seems to be archived here (the dub, but that's what I always watched) and maybe if you're American you can buy it here? Sorry for becoming so obsessed with such a random and unavailable series lol