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What Colors Mean, With the Characters From the Film Inside Out
Discover how to use colors to enrich your characters, through examples from the film Inside Out
Colors are visual perceptions that have helped us tell stories and provoke sensations, emotions, and interpretations for thousands of years. Depending on the culture using them, their meaning can vary, as in the case of red which is associated with purity and sensuality in India and with death in parts of Africa.
Understanding and mastering the use of colors is fundamental in creating art and illustrations, especially when designing characters that should transmit feelings, personality traits, behaviors, and historical context. The way in which we construct a character and choose their colors determines who the audience will interpret them.
In the book The Psychology of Colors, specialist and sociologist Eva Heller holds that the our perception of color changes according to context, but that they can also be associated with universal experiences in our language and thinking.
To help you choose your characters’ colors, illustrator, character designer, and graphic script artist Caio Martins (@caiorfmartins) shares his advice on how to enrich the meaning of your characters through examples from Inside Out.
Hear what he has to say in the video below!
Blue: Sadness
Sadness is represented by the color blue, considered the safest option for almost all cultures. While it’s often associated with positive things, it represents sadness and pessimism in Inside Out.
Blue can also transmit feelings and associations such as: trust, truth, serenity, intelligence, technology, loneliness, passivity, dreams, tranquility, introspection and motherhood.
Red: Anger
Rage is represented by one of the most intense colors on the spectrum, associated with intense feelings of anger, anxiety, intensity, agony, strength, and aggression.
However, red is also associated with love, passion, warmth, emotion, danger, elegance, eroticism, seduction, power, justice, dynamism, leadership, energy, and proactiveness.
Green: Disgust
In Inside Out, the character and emotion associated with green is disgust. It is also critical and sincere. Green is a color we often see in nature, in elements of vegetables, and, thus, it’s very connected to life. It’s commonly found in medical and healthcare centres.
Other values linked to green are: calm, hope, fear, apprehension, submission, trust, admiration, acceptance, surprise, distraction, wealth, inexperience, and jealousy.
Purple: Fear
Fear, represented by purple, is a mix of blue and red and carries properties of the two, notions that can even conflict: power and apathy, bravery and fear. It is also a symbol of piety and faith, honor and nobility.
Other common associations are: royalty, wealth, spirituality, penitence, and mourning.
Yellow: Joy
One of the most vibrant colors on the spectrum, yellow is generally used on traffic signs as it grabs people’s attention. It’s also often used to express happiness, jolliness, optimism, comfort, hope, care, cowardice and warmth (it is, after all, the color of the sun).
If you still have doubts about how to use colors to represent feelings and emotions, the infographic below, created by Copy Press, can serve as a practical guide:
If color theory interests you, you can use the Adobe Color site to automatically create harmonious palettes based on complementary and analogous colors, as well as numerous other elements, for free.
Learn to bring your illustrated characters to life, passing through every stage of the process, from the briefing to the model sheet, on his online course Character Design for Animation with Photoshop.
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