5 Notes
Erm, About that Colour Problem; Didn’t We Decide on Black..?
Judge Dredd’s uniform and helmet are black, but artists quite often use blue to highlight the uniform and helmet in order to give the drawing depth. Carlos Ezquerra used to do this, but now doesn’t… as the image above shows. I think we answered the whole blue/black question a dozen-or-so posts back; Judge Dredd’s uniform and helmet are black.
BUT - Darth Vader is a man clad all in black, from head-to-toe, right? We’ll get back to this in a moment.
And what of the Stallone Dredd movie? The costume looks almost black on-screen, but photographs show that the helmet was a medium blue colour and the uniform was navy.
Huh? What’s all that about?
Well, a closer look at Vader’s fabulous helmet - and I mean the proper one used in the films - shows that there is a whole lot more than just black going on. Large portions of the helmet are painted gun-metal grey! And once you look into prop-making for film you realise why blue was definitely the right choice for Stallone’s garb-of-office.
Black, as a surface colour, has a habit of sucking in the entire visible spectrum and robbing an object of any distinct shape or form. That’s why Darth Vader’s helmet has lots of grey highlighting and that’s why Sylvester Stallone wore blue. If either costume were pure black they would have looked drab, characterless, flat and lifeless on screen. Costume and prop makers understand this and use colour effects in real life similar to those used by comic book artists on the page.
After five coats of filler-primer I appled three coats of deepest, purest satin black to my Dredd helmet and…
…ugh! Flat, dull and lifeless!
Some posts back (this one, actually) fellow Tumblr SJHawkins (you should check out and follow his stuff here) suggested a dark blue colour for compromise…
…oh yeah! Now we’re talking! Cheers, SJ.
Some little more work to do on the helmet, but I reckon it’ll be finished within a few days…
…but there’s soooo much more left to do if I’m going to have this costume finished in time for a Halloween Pub Crawl.
Stay tuned.
