Color Dream
A story I'd been carrying for years. A competition that finally made me tell it.
The Concept
I've always been captivated by the idea of undiscovered colors.
Not in a naive way. I understand the science. The visible spectrum is mapped. Human perception has limits. There is no new color waiting to be named. But there's something about that boundary that has always fascinated me. The idea that reality might contain entire dimensions of experience that exist just outside the range of what we're built to perceive. That the right key, turned the right way, might open a door that nobody knew was there.
A two-dimensional being would have no framework for understanding three-dimensional movement. It wouldn't be a matter of intelligence or imagination. The concept would simply be outside the available vocabulary of their existence. I think about that a lot. What are we the two-dimensional version of?
Color Dream is my attempt to put that feeling into a story.
The Story
Two girls, childhood friends. One artsy, one scientific.
The artsy girl shares a dream: Wouldn't it be amazing to discover a new color? The science girl does what science girls do: She looks it up. All colors have been discovered. The visible spectrum is finite. There is no new color to find.
The information lands differently on each of them. For the artsy girl it's a small heartbreak. It’s a door closing on something she hadn't realized she'd been hoping for. For the science girl, it's the opposite. A question has been answered, which means a deeper question has been opened.
They grow apart the way childhood friends do. The artsy girl stays in the creative world but moves toward black and white photography; capturing reality exactly as it exists, no interpretation, no color, no illusion. The science girl follows her curiosity into particle physics.
Years later, sifting through data from a recent experiment, something shifts. A connection forms that she can't put into words. Something unlocks. She phases through into an unseen realm. There and then gone; leaving her colleagues bewildered and alone in the lab.
She reappears before the artsy girl. Both older now. Still carrying the same look she had as a kid when a question got its hooks into her.
She shares the secret. They vanish together.
The Process
The competition’s theme was Daydreaming: stories about childhood, wonder, and the inner life of young minds. Color Dream fit loosely but genuinely. The characters begin as children whose fantastical (perhaps naive) ideas set the course of everything that follows. The whole story is really about what happens when you take a kid's impossible dream seriously enough to follow it all the way.
The science mattered to me. I didn't want the story to feel like magical thinking dressed up in lab coats. I wanted the science to be real (or at least real-adjacent) so I did the research.
A RadioLab episode about mantis shrimp had stayed with me for years. Mantis shrimp have the most advanced visual systems of any known creature; capable of perceiving multiple spectrums of light completely invisible to humans. The idea that something alive and real on this planet is experiencing a version of reality we can't access felt like exactly the right catalyst for the science girl's journey. She becomes obsessed with the creature and eventually builds a science fair experiment around circular polarizers and how they bend and separate light into its component parts.
I learned about circular polarizers and sugar water specifically for this comic. It’s made me look forward to when my own kid is old enough to enter a science-fair.
The timeline was brutal. I came to the competition late. Ten pages in under a month, alongside existing freelance commitments and family life. My normal pace is roughly a page a week. I had to find another gear.
I made a deliberate choice early on to keep the art simple. Not because I couldn't do more, but because doing more would have meant doing less of it. Clean, readable pages that served the story felt more valuable than labored pages that missed the deadline. I'm at peace with that tradeoff. The simplicity suits the tone.
The story was referred to as Dimension Girls for a long time. It was a working title that described the concept more than the feeling. Color Dream felt closer to what the story actually was, so I changed it right before submission time.
The Work
The Result
Top 10 of 160 entries. Published in the Tapas x Kickstarter anthology alongside the other nine winners.
More personally though, the idea is finally out of my head. I carry a lot of stories around that never find their way to the page. This competition gave me the deadline I needed to stop carrying this one and start telling it. That matters to me independently of the placement.
What It Means to Me
I included this project in my portfolio not because it's the most technically polished thing I've made (it’s not) but because it represents something I think is worth showing.
A creative director who only makes things for clients is only half a creative director. The other half is the person who makes things because they can't not make them. Who carries ideas around for years waiting for the right moment. Who does the research not because anyone asked but because the story deserves it.
Color Dream exists because a competition gave me a deadline. But the idea behind it has been with me for as long as I can remember. This persistent suspicion that reality is larger than our world allows us to see.
I hope that comes through on the page.