Exercise 1 – Colour Schemes
I used this Colour wheel to pick my colours.
Here is a list of all the colour schemes and some swatches I have considered;
Monochromatic Analogous Complementary Triadic
In the end I decided to go with a complementary colour palette using blue and orange.
I chose to colour a landscape thumbnail from last week;
I drew inspiration from one of my favourite illustrators when picking these two colours. Moebius (Jean Giraud) released a comic named Arzach in 1975. It included panels which used red/orange with blue.
I think the colours contrast very strongly together which naturally draws your attention to them.
Exercise II : Colour and Emotions
For this task I used photoshop to paint these scenes. I started off by blocking in the base colours i would use within the lines of the given drawing, and then I began adding in details, shading and highlights.
Joyful
I chose a triadic colour scheme to create a happy scene. I think the warm orange sky works well beside the purple landscape, and it contrasts nicely with the bright blue water. I added in some green for the grass to give the image a more joyful outdoor feeling.
sad
I used an analogous colour scheme for this scene. I wanted to use sad colours so I painted the sky a mauve colour and used blues for the landscape. I decided to paint the water black however i feel i should have instead used a dark shade of blue instead as i feel it distracts from the scene as a whole. In the future, i will ensure that if i am trying to create a sad scene I will not use bold colours like black because they cause the viewer to focus on the colour as opposed to the overall feeling of the scene.
Colour Scheme Study
I studied how Vewn uses colour to create different moods for her animations.
In the colour scripts below made from these shots, I can see how each scene uses colour to help the viewer feel the emotions that Vewn is visualising.
Looking at these colours all together, I can see that Vewn likes using analogous colours and mixing vibrant colours with dark tones. She often dots a bright colour into her scenes to draw attention to the character or setting. To create a relaxed mood, usually an evening scene, she uses muted blues and purples and even dims the bright single colour which is usually bright.
Sugar Prohibition
I have used sketches and colour to visualise a world where sugar is prohibited.
Personally, at the start of this week I didn’t really enjoy working with this world because a critical theme in it’s design was that the colours had to be monochrome – I gave it a go anyway and came up with these monochrome blue thumbnails. I found its setting in the 1800’s limiting as I struggled to imagine ways to visualise clearly that sugar had been prohibited since sweets weren’t common the 1800’s. I felt like I was just looking at old photos and drawing them – had the world been set today, I would find lots of creative potential using settings like streets filled with people protesting, closed down businesses and old plastic wrappers since an uproar would be reasonable to expect if sugar was prohibited today. Then I realised that I wasn’t being open minded and I was making things difficult for myself by thinking too much about what I can’t draw instead of what I could draw – the plot of this world is very interesting and has really well developed characters. I’m excited to begin coming up with designs for these characters for the rest of this week based on what the team has described. To improve, I need to become better at adapting and enjoying coming up with ideas even if i’m not 100% enthusiastic about a given task.
Reference Images
I used pinterest to source my reference images. I looked for pictures of old bars, secret rooms and mysterious stairways as I thought this would link well with the theme of underground prohibited business.
Finding Colour Palettes
My team and I took photographs around the campus to find interesting colour palettes. We found posters that used complimentary, monochromatic and analogous colours.
I really enjoyed this method of creating clour palletes and I imagine this would be a nice way to come up with natural colour schemes for outdoor scenes by sourcing colours from photography.