Here it is! The end of Laeluu's masterful coloring of the first 1,000 strips, and the beginning of my clumsy foray into color back in 2010.

I cringe when I see these early color strips, but most people don't notice the difference. Funny enough, this particular strip prompted a fellow artist (unforch I can't recall her name) to send me some feedback that I've followed ever since:

This strip is a night scene. When we're coloring things in the dark, they should be far less saturated than they are in full light... and darker, which is obvious, but apparently not so obvious to Danielle of 2010. 

I used Hazel's stock colors - her hair and skin color are eyedropped directly from other strips where she was featured in daylight. I kinda just hoped that the context of her in bed, plus the dark sleepy blue of her sheets, would give the reader the impression that it was nighttime in the dark. 

And it worked!

But now I know better. I still apply the stock colors - daylight colors - first, but then I lay a flat layer of desaturated blue overtop all of those daylight colors, and lessen the opacity until it looks right (exact science, there). It's cheating, because I'm not carefully tweaking each color separately, but it's a quick way to desaturate and blue-ify the colors so they look like they're in shadow.

If you'd like to see an example of what I'm talking about, you needn't search any further than the last strip. Laeluu knew this trick when she colored #1000. :)

I guess there's not much point to linking the old posts, now that I'm posting the same exact images that were posted nine years ago (NINE god dammit, NINE???). It'd be different if the blog posts matched the strips, but something went wonky when we moved these old strips to Hiveworks, so most of them are off by days, weeks, or sometimes months! So I'll just add commentary below the next 1,000 strips when the mood strikes me, rather than link "the old strip."

Here's to the next one thousand and eight strips together!! <3