Assignment 3 “Ego” – Project Prep 2 – Colour Schemes/Harmonies

Colour Harmony

In design and the visual arts, colour is an important element in bringing out the best parts of an image – if the image is visually uninteresting, the viewer is disengaged; if the image is visually too chaotic, the viewer gets confused at what to look at. Hence, the use of colour harmonies or colour schemes become significant in its use to create a proper hierarchy for an image for it to be visually balanced.

Monochromatic

Rather than an actual harmony, monochromatic harmony consists of a single hue and varying tints of that colour. This harmony is typically low in contrast and visually homogeneous but it is considered pleasing to the eye and easy to apply with good result.

Analogous

Analogous harmonies consists of a few colours adjacent to each other on the colour wheel. Typically, one colour will dominate with the other 2 or 3 as accent colours. As they are next to each other on the colour wheel, this harmony typically produces little contrast and instead creates unity and consistency in the colours without being too monotonous.

Diadic

The diadic colour scheme consists of 2 colours one space away from each other in the colour wheel. Although the diadic scheme is still pretty harmonious due to the similarity in hue, it is unlike the analogous colour scheme as the slight gap between the 2 colours produce a slight contrast between them.

Complementary

The colours in a complementary colour scheme are typically 2 that are directly opposite each other in the colour wheel; this scheme is the easiest way to bring out the most contrast in an image and can be used to make an image more striking. However, due to the high contrast, excessive use of this colour scheme without proper balance can make an image look jarring and hard to read.

Split Complementary

The colours in a split complementary colour scheme are derived from the two colours adjacent to the original colour complement – this still creates a great amount of contrast between the 3 colours but not to the extent of the direct complementary colour scheme. Due to the high contrast between the colours, proper care must be taken when using the colours to create a visually coherent image.

Triadic

A triadic colour scheme consists of 3 colours equally spaced from each other in the colour wheel -their equidistance from each other creates equal contrast between each other and thus creates a overall vibrant colour palette. They are considerably harder to recognise (as a colour scheme) and appear comfortable to the eye.

Square Tetrad

A square tetrad colour scheme consists of 2 primary colours and 2 secondary colours spaced equally between (and opposite each other in pairs) in the colour wheel. The positioning of the colours in the colour hue mean that the resulting colour scheme is extremely vibrant. The square colour scheme works best with all 4 colours used evenly in an image to balance out each other.

Rectagular Tetrad

In a tetrad colour scheme, one can have 2 primary colours with 2 secondary colours, or 4 tertiary colours – this gives a wide variety of colour combinations to choose from but also makes it harder to juggle to create a visually balanced image. The colours, if not handled properly, can also tend to appear muddy – hence fixing one as a dominant colour and the rest of the colours as accents is a good way to balance this colour palette. The variety of hues in this palette also makes this colour scheme hard to recognise.

Assignment 3 “Ego” – Project Prep

Colour – the visual perception of electromagnetic radiation by the eye that falls under the visible light spectrum; it is a continuous spectrum of colours varying from red (infrared) to violet (ultraviolet).

Between the colours red and violet in the visible spectrum of light, the continuous variation creates an infinite number of colours of varying shades, saturation and vibrancy. Hence, I will discuss a few basic colours and 2 basic colour systems right under the cut!

Continue reading →

Assignment 2 “Nursery Rhyme” – Working and rejected compositions

The cow jumped over the moon

This was my initial composition before more design principles were implemented

I tried to juxtapose the scale of the moon to the globe, and to stack the cows while varying size and opacity to suggest hierarchy but I felt that it was too literal an interpretation of the nursery rhyme which made it less interesting and dynamic.

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.

For this composition, I tried to play around with the idea of “living in a shoe” – thus the stacking of shoes to create a house where the old woman lived. Personally, I like this interpretation of the nursery rhyme but I felt that the composition was too static and boring so I decided not to use it.

The little dog laughed, to see such sport

This was my initial concept for this line of the nursery rhyme – I went with a more comic book/graphic novel-esque presentation by using a dominant “speaking figure”, lines pointing out from the figure’s mouth to indicate speech or movement.The little devil was alliterated to point outwards to indicate fun or mischief, and 2 rubber duckies were also put together to create a little bow tie for the dog. However , I felt that this composition was too simplistic so I decided not to use it.

Assignment 2 “Nursery Rhyme” – Final

The cow jumped over the moon

For this composition, I wanted to juxtapose the scale of the moon and the cow to emphasize the difference in size – I also decided to choose a realistic looking cow (instead of the cartoon ones) to contrast with the cartoonish style of the moon.

Initially, I tried to overlap the moon with the cow (to show the cow jumping OVER the moon) but I felt that it covered too many details of the moon and made the image very awkward. Hence, I decided to just use the cow to cover the space between the edges of the crescent moon, with many cows in different sizes to evoke the motion of jumping/falling.

The little dog laughed, to see such sport

For this image, I decided to combine an image of a baby figurine and the dog head to create a humanoid/animal figure instead of a simple dog as I wanted to bring out the fun (and almost bizarre) feeling of the poem. I rotated and reflected elements of image to create a kind of pattern similar to a kaleidoscope – to evoke the feeling of fun, light-heartedness and absurdity like that of the poem.

The rubber duckies along the side were also added to add to the fun feeling, to express the dog’s laughter and amusement. The opacity of the rubber duckies were toggled to make them part of the background pattern, preventing them from taking attention away from the dog humanoid, the dominant figure in the composition

She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do

To evoke the feeling of “didn’t know what to do”, I tried to juxtapose many children hanging over the old woman’s head to create a looming, overwhelming effect. The stacking of the baby patterns was also done to create a feeling of dizziness, to emphasize the dilemma of the old woman. The babies right in the middle of the composition, however, were not stacked but instead gradually increasing in size as they near the woman’s head , stopping right above her. This was to create an overall dominant figure in the composition in spite of the distracting patterns in the background and also to emphasize the relationship between the old woman and her children (children>old woman, overbearing and overwhelming).

The size of the baby patterns in the back ground were also varied to a smaller extent as they became further away from the woman’s head to create and emphasize the radial symmetry in the image; it was also to emphasize the woman in the middle of the composition but creating implied lines that lined up to point at her head.

Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle

For this composition, I didn’t want to do the most instinctive interpretation of the nursery rhyme – which was to depict the cat holding or playing the fiddle in some way or another. While I was playing around with the different images, I realized that the image of the upright cat somehow resembles the thin, tall silhouette of the fiddle hence I tried to play up that similarity. By lining up the cat with three other fiddles in the foreground, I wanted to make the cat the dominant figure by making it the break in the lineup of fiddles. I decided to align the cat slightly off center, as well as to increase its size such that it was bigger than the fiddles beside it, to emphasize it even further. The organic, irregular nature of the cat’s silhouette also contrasts highly with the symmetrical, regular silhouette of the fiddle, bringing out their differences even further and thus making the cat even more obvious in its similarity yet difference from the objects around it.

In the background,the lineup concept was used again to echo that of the foreground and to create an overall pattern and harmony in the image – the opacity and size of the fiddles were manipulated to ensure that it stayed in the background as a pattern instead of dominating the foreground. The lineup was also made tighter in the background than the foreground to imply horizontal lines across the composition to create a strong, stable composition. A slight overlap was used as well between the foreground and the background to make the foreground stand out more and to make the break in the regular pattern (the cat) more obvious.

Assignment 2 “Nursery Rhyme” – Project Prep 2

These were the images that I prepared and submitted onto the shared folder for this assignment. Apart from the first and the last image(which were taken from vintage illustrations and dingbats fonts respectively), everything else was shot by me on my camera with things that I found around the house. I decided to use this hands on approach with objects that were not directly related to the nursery rhymes as I wanted to introduce variety into the collages made. In retrospect, the objects that I chose might have ended up to be too tangential for people to use them effectively.