This topic came up on cosplay.com...

[ohariko.livejournal.com]

[Poll #1187121]
I'm interested in to see what your guys opinion is because the way I look at it, Lulu's hair is black and nothing more but some morons on cosplay.com thinks it's dark brown: http://www.cosplay.com/showthread.php?t=147188 .The nice easy way for me to remember it is that Lulu is black, Suzaku's hair is brown. Simple, ne? What's your opinion?

Comments

[sevthebat.livejournal.com]

Okay, these people are clearly neglecting the fact that anime ≠ real life. (And from cosplay.com, why does that not surprise me?)

It's very difficult to shade black hair in an art style that uses black line. Using dark shades of grey as a "black" color makes everything look desaturated, and you can't use a solid #000000 black because the detail in cel-shaded art is achieved 90% of the time through line, and the rest of the time through highlights. So excuse Sunrise for wanting the details of their protagonist's hair to be, y'know, actually visible and choosing to go with a purplish/redish "black" some of the time.

His hair is obviously supposed to be black, or if not then very, very close to it. =_=;

[ohariko.livejournal.com]

They forget that alot that in anime, black isn't always black. Like in D.Gray-Man, Kanda's hair and Lenalee's hair is tinted with blue or green shades, but their hair isn't that color. It's black.

[sevthebat.livejournal.com]

Exactly. They ought to open up all the images of black-haired anime characters in a color picker some time.

As an aspiring artist who has actually been paid to do cel-shading on a per-hour basis (i.e., as a job, not a one-off commission), I'm telling you that it would be impossible with CG's art style for Lelouch to have pure black hair and not look ridiculous. The black might not actually be there, but it's implied.