A noir scene is easy to recognize and surprisingly easy to ruin. Fill a rain-wet street with cheerful colors and it turns into a picnic. Fill all of it with black and it turns into a smudge. The mood lives in between, in a small number of well-chosen colors and a lot of contrast.
This guide is for anyone coloring true crime line art, on paper or on a screen. It explains what gives noir its look, then walks through a method you can follow on any dark scene, with five palettes to borrow. The method and the palettes are our suggestions, not rules. The history and color-theory facts are sourced at the end.
What makes a scene look "noir"
The word comes from film. "Film noir" is French for "black film," and, according to the standard overview on Wikipedia, it was first applied to Hollywood movies by the French critic Nino Frank in 1946. The same overview describes the classic noir of the 1940s and 1950s as having a low-key, black-and-white visual style with roots in German expressionist cinematography, and says it is often identified with low-key lighting and unbalanced compositions.
For a colorist, the useful part is low-key lighting: a scene that is mostly dark, with a few bright areas where light falls. Art has an older word for this. Tate defines chiaroscuro as an Italian term meaning "light-dark," referring to the balance and pattern of light and shade in a painting or drawing, and says it is mostly remarked upon when an artist uses extreme contrasts of light and shade. The Getty Museum describes it as using the contrast of light and dark areas to show the effects of light and shadow on form.
That is the whole secret of the style: contrast. Not black, not gloom. A dark scene with a few places where the light gets in.
Noir does not have to be black and white
It is tempting to think noir only works in grayscale, and your palette has to be gloomy. History says otherwise. Leave Her to Heaven (1945) is widely treated as a film noir, and it was shot in Technicolor. The UCLA Film & Television Archive describes its cinematography as a "bright, airy counterpoint" to the film's dark obsessions, and the Academy Awards list for 1945 shows Leon Shamroy winning Best Cinematography (Color) for it.
So there is no single correct noir palette. What matters is that the scene has a clear light and dark structure, and that the colors you choose support it.
The one idea: think in light and dark first
Every coloring decision below comes back to value, a plain word for how light or dark something is. Two colors can be very different in hue (a red and a green) yet have the same value, in which case, side by side, they look flat. Two colors of the same hue can look completely different if one is pale and one is deep.
A quick test: squint at your page, or turn your screen down to grayscale (most phones have a color filter or grayscale option in their accessibility settings). If you can still tell what is a lamp, what is a wall and what is a shadow, the value structure works. If everything merges into one gray, it needs more separation.
Step by step
1. Decide where the light comes from
Before choosing a single color, find the light. Noir scenes usually have one or two obvious sources: a desk lamp, a streetlight, a doorway, a neon sign, a window blind. Everything near the source is lighter, everything far away is darker. Deciding this first keeps the page consistent.
2. Choose a small palette
Pick four or five colors and stay with them: two or three darks, one mid-tone and one accent. Limiting the palette is what makes a page look intentional, a point we also make in our guide to true crime coloring pages. Use the palettes below if you want a starting point.
3. Fill the biggest shadows with dark colors that are not black
The large dark masses (night sky, wall in shadow, road) set the mood. A very deep navy, brown or green-gray usually looks richer than pure black and leaves the drawn outlines readable. Save near-black for the very deepest spots: under a car, inside a doorway.
4. Add the mid-tones
Next come the walls, furniture and surfaces that catch some light. These are your connecting colors. Keep them muted. If the mid-tones are as bright as the accent, the accent will stop standing out.
5. Place the light
Now add the lightest values, but only where the light is: the lampshade, the lit window, the pool of light on the floor, the edge of a desk. A small, clean area of pale warm color against a large dark one gives you the pull-the-eye effect that the style depends on.
6. Add one accent
A single accent color (amber, red, teal) draws the eye to the focal point. Use it sparingly: a neon sign, a lit cigarette, a stamp on a folder. One accent looks deliberate; five look like a mistake.
7. Step back and check
Squint, or grayscale the page. Then fix the weak spots: darken a wall that competes with the focal point, or brighten the lamp that should glow.
Five palettes to borrow
Hex codes are given so you can match them on a screen; on paper, pick the closest pencils or markers you own. The swatches are our own suggestions.
| Palette | Colors | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Rainy streetlight | #121826 night#2F4059 slate#8C9AAB fog#E8A33D amber |
Streets, alleys, wet roads |
| Detective's office | #3B2A1F walnut#6B4A2F umber#C48B2F ochre#5E6350 olive#EADFC8 paper |
Desks, case boards, notebooks |
| Motel neon | #0E1117 night#3A4A5C gray#1F8A8A teal#D6336C pink#F2D9A0 window |
Highways, motel signs, night exteriors |
| Newsprint archive | #E9E1CC newsprint#2B2B2B ink#8A6A45 sepia#A63D2F rust#7C8B73 green |
Clippings, folders, evidence, archives |
| One red on gray | #1F1F1F charcoal#6A6A6A mid#C9C9C9 light#B3202A red |
Classic black-and-white look with a single focal point |
A rule of thumb that works well with any of these: roughly 60 percent dark, 30 percent mid-tone and 10 percent light and accent. It is a guideline, not a law, but if your page feels flat or noisy, check whether your proportions are far from it.
Using an accent color well
Colors do not behave independently. In the nineteenth century, the French chemist Michel Chevreul was hired by the Gobelins tapestry works to investigate the fading of their threads. In his 1839 book De la Loi du Contraste Simultané des Couleurs, as summarized by the WebExhibits color exhibit, he showed that the problem was not fading at all: it was simultaneous contrast between neighboring colored threads. In plain terms, a color looks different depending on what sits next to it. The same exhibit notes that Goethe had already identified complementary colors, which he called "completing colors."
For coloring, this gives two practical habits:
- Put your accent next to the darkest area you have. A small amber sign against a navy wall looks brighter than the same amber in the middle of a pale page.
- Test colors in place, not in the palette. A swatch in isolation tells you little. Fill a small area and judge it beside its neighbors, which is easy to do on a screen with undo.
Paper and screen tips
On paper
- Work light to dark. A pencil can always add more pigment, but cannot take it away.
- Leave the bare paper for your brightest highlights where you can.
- Build dark areas in layers of two or three colors (say navy over brown) instead of pressing hard with one.
On a screen
- Tap to fill the big shapes first, then zoom in for small details such as lamps, signs and labels. In the True Crime Coloring Book app, the coloring is tap, fill, zoom and undo.
Common mistakes
| Mistake | Fix |
|---|---|
| Everything is the same darkness. | Pick a light source and keep one area clearly lighter. |
| Filling every shadow with pure black. | Use deep navy, brown or green-gray, and keep black for the deepest spots. |
| Too many accent colors. | Choose one, or two at most. |
| Using pure white for highlights. | A warm cream looks more like lamplight and sits better with dark colors. |
| Bright mid-tones. | Mute them so the accent has room to stand out. |
| Judging colors one by one. | Check each color next to its neighbors, then squint at the whole page. |
Frequently asked questions
What colors are used in noir?
Classic film noir was usually shot in black and white, so its look is built on dark tones and strong contrast. When people translate that into color, they typically use deep blues, browns and grays with one warm or saturated accent. As the example of Leave Her to Heaven shows, though, noir has also been made in bright color.
Do I have to use black?
No. Very dark blues, browns and greens often give more depth. Keep true black for the smallest, deepest shadows.
Can I color a noir scene in bright colors?
Yes. The noir feel comes from contrast and mood, not from a fixed list of colors. If you use bright hues, keep their values clearly different and leave areas of real darkness.
Which pages work best for beginners?
Pages with large, simple shapes: a street at night, a single desk or a motel sign. They let you practice the light-to-dark structure before you tackle fine detail.
Where the app fits in
The Murder Motels & Dark Roads, Crime Scenes and Interrogation Rooms collections in the True Crime Coloring Book app are made for this kind of palette work: neon signs over rain-wet roads, cordoned rooms and steel tables, drawn as line art for you to color. The artwork is illustrative rather than graphic.
Sources
- Film noir, Wikipedia: the 1946 use of the term by Nino Frank, the low-key black-and-white style, and German expressionist roots. This is a general overview, not a primary source.
- Tate, Chiaroscuro, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, glossary entry for chiaroscuro: definitions of light-dark contrast.
- UCLA Film & Television Archive, Nitrate Noir: Leave Her to Heaven / Nightmare Alley: the Technicolor cinematography of Leave Her to Heaven.
- 18th Academy Awards, Wikipedia: Best Cinematography (Color), 1945.
- WebExhibits, Goethe and Chevreul: Simultaneous Contrast: Chevreul's work for the Gobelins tapestry factory and Goethe's complementary colors.
- Palettes, step order, proportions and the paper and screen tips are our own suggestions based on common coloring practice.
