Research

18/11/201731/01/2018

2D Project 3: Ego in different settings (Final)

Process parts 1-3 can be found here:

2D Project 3: Ego in different settings (Process Pt.1 & 2)

2D Project 3: Ego in different settings (Process Pt.3)

Presentation

Equation 1

When a timid person is alone, he tends to be more expressive.

Square colour harmony

In this colour harmony, there are two sets of complementary colours, each set has a dominant and subdominant colour.

– yellow & blue, yellow dominant

– green & red, green dominant

I used an overall muted colour scheme to depict a typical boring classroom environment. The shadows make the light more contrasting and prominent, also, the direction of light and where the other characters are looking draws your attention to the character in focus.

Split complementary colour harmony

A warm and vibrant orangey composition to depict a relaxing afternoon bath, with a bit of blue and green to complement it and to give it a strong visual contrast between warm and cool colours. Again, the ray of light from the window draws attention to the character, also, the darker foreground elements to give a sense of depth.

Analogous colour harmony

For analogous there would typically be a dominant, subdominant and a third colour to be used as an accent.

In this case, blue violet is the dominant, violet and pink are the subdominant and the red along with the whites are the accents. There is an overall harmonious blend of colours, depicting a night time concert.

The lack of details in the background make it seem very foggy which gives a sense of depth that the location is very large. Due to the strong spotlight, the main character and the surrounding audience is given a rim light so that the mid and foreground elements interact with each other.

Equation 2

Because I own the Lamborghini of electric unicycles. endangering lives since 2017.

Split complementary colour harmony

The amount of blue and orange/yellow is slightly equal so there isn’t really a dominant colour, the warm and cool colours are balanced out.

This is a late afternoon setting as you can tell from the orange light cast on the ground and the long shadows of the trees. The rim light on the trees make them stand out more. The trees nearer are darker and those further are lighter.

Triadic colour harmony

Triadic colours of red, blue and yellow. For this colour harmony, there is typically a dominant and two other colours for the accents. In this case, blue is the dominant.

I tried to keep this one simple, no details besides the rim light which shows the form of some of the elements such as the guy’s body and the details of the bridge. Clouds used to draw your eye to the guy and to balance the composition, on the left is giant cloud + less trees, on the right, small cloud + more trees.

Split complementary colour harmony

I initially wanted to go for a muted colour scheme of like a typical race track scene of grey roads and a few coloured cars, but in the end i referenced the Cars movie from Pixar and went for a desert sunset theme instead. The dominant colours are orange and yellow, with blue as the cast shadows.

Also, a dutch tilt to make it more dynamic since it’s a moving race car, lines on the ground also act as perspective lines to give it a sense of perspective.

Equation 3

Drawing and daydreaming in lectures, mostly Art History, nothing against you Prof. Walsh.

Analogous colour harmony

Colours give it a very sleepy and dream like state kind of environment, as well as the lack of strong contrasting colours which makes it sort of muted which adds to the sleepy feel.

Character in focus is of a slightly brighter colour as compared to the rest, who are tinted with pinkish red to make them blend in with the environment and less prominent.

Since there are so many people, one way to make this one guy stand out is to make him brighter and another way was to use the rule of thirds to place him in an area of focus.

Analogous colour harmony

I wanted to go for a late afternoon time of day and hence chose a colour scheme of red-orange, orange, and yellow-orange the floor is made completely white to show there’s a very strong sunlight casting down, which allowed me to draw in contrasting cast shadows.

Split complementary colour harmony

I wanted to go for a very joyous, adventurous and majestic feel to this illustration, I took inspiration from DreamWork’s How to Train Your Dragon, where a bunch of dragons are flying above the clouds with what is called ‘god light’ shining down to give it that majestic feel. Rim lights are added to the clouds to give the volume.

Initially, it looked very plain and boring and i wanted to scrap it, but after adding lights everywhere it became one of my favourites out of the twelve.

Equation 4

I don’t pull all-nighters, it’s just for the sake of this equation :p

Complementary colour harmony

The turquoise window with the rain outside gives a very cozy feeling in the otherwise dull coloured room. There are two elements of focus, one is the window on the left and the other one is the main light source on the right, the two balances each other out.

There are rim lights on the elements in the darkness, again, to make them interact with the lights. The blurred foreground element gives depth to the image.

Split complementary harmony

A strong cone of light to draw your attention to the area. Characters in the foreground have rim light to show that there is interaction between foreground and mid ground.

Split complementary harmony

I went for a colour scheme which portrayed a relaxing sunny white sandy beach and cool turquoise water. I used a diagonal composition as since the guy is laying down, I didn’t want him to be parallel with the sides. I filled in the empty spaces of the beach with bushes and details of small rocks and seashells and Cody the Crab™.

Research and references

My greatest inspiration was from Pascal Campion’s illustrations, whose illustrations always tell a story and are visually engaging.

I also referenced a few colour schemes from colour keys and scripts of animated films. I find these very inspiring as the artist is able to use lighting and colours in such small thumbnail illustrations to tell a story.

Colour scripts – Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Printing

When I test printed, the colours turned out quite yellowish. I had to apply a colour balance to all my illustrations to cancel it out. I eventually went for the top right adjustments.

Conclusion

A challenge i faced was working with square compositions and not the usual 16:9, it was quite challenging to get a good composition from such a small working space, but I think I made it work by keeping most of the elements in focus off centre and using the rule of thirds, along with the lighting.

I also tend to colour pick a lot from existing illustrations, the colours work but I have to tweak or remove some colours so that they fit into one of the colour harmonies taught to us. I find that colour picking is a very good way of approaching illustrating especially when you are not good with colours because you can see the colours the artist used and you can visualise how they would work with your own drawing.

This project has been very fun as I have never done so many illustrations before in one project, it has definitely improved my sense of colour usage and visualisation.

Find cody in all 12 illustrations c:

21/10/201721/10/2017

2D Project 2: Forrest Gump (Final Project & Research)

Below are the links to Process Part 1 and Part 2:

2D Project 2: Forrest Gump (Process Pt. 1)

2D Project 2: Forrest Gump (Process Pt. 2)

Final 4 designs

Presentation

For this project, I looked towards surrealism as it is a style in art that feature the element of surprise and unexpected juxtapositions.

I also aimed to use anthropomorphism for this project as it is an easy way to make things look more interesting and visually engaging.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/565131453210619329/

https://www.pinterest.com/jowilson/art-anthropomorphism/?lp=true

The first artist I researched on was Eugenia Loli, courtesy of Joy, I like how she merges different elements of different ‘styles’ but is still able to make them work and come together as a whole.

http://www.galerieproject.com/eugenia-loli-collages/

References

Joy had initially given me the idea of replacing the power plant chimneys with cigarettes, which I thought was pretty cool, I went on to research on anti-smoking posters and other similar posters, they subvert the meaning of the object in focus and lets the viewer think about the meaning of the object in its new ‘environment’.

http://beforeitsnews.com/fine-art/2012/10/35-creative-anti-smoking-ads-2448176.html

http://webneel.com/30-brilliant-anti-smoking-advertisements-your-inspiration-best-print-ads-and-posters

23/08/201730/08/2017

2D Project 1: My Line is Emo (Research on Artists’ works)

A brief introduction on various artists and a personal take on how their works can influence my project.

Ed Moses

Ed Moses’s works are abstract and non-objective. Moses tries to break away from the containment of the canvas, here are more layers and chaos in his works. In the 1970s, he introduced the diagonal grid into his works, in the late 1980s, these diagonal grids became more of loose squiggles.

His earlier works appear more rigid, consisting of individual blocks that seem to be violently drawn, giving it texture and character.

Sol Lewitt

Lewitt works are of conceptual art and minimalism, he is regarded to be these movements’ founder. In 2005 LeWitt began a series of ‘scribble’ wall drawings, so termed because they required the draftsmen to fill in areas of the wall by scribbling with graphite.

Lewitt uses the same repetitive element, scribbles, but with varying densities to create his work. This can be applied to my project, using the same mark making tools but applied with different densities.

Cai Guo Qiang

Cai initially began working with gunpowder drawings and ephemeral sculptures to foster spontaneity and confront the suppressive, controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China. His gunpowder drawings convey his central idea of using natural energy forces to create works that connect both the artist and the viewer with a primordial state of chaos, contained in the moment of explosion. They also demonstrate his central interest in the relationship of matter and energy.

Cai Guo Qiang’s approach in his method of creating art is quite unorthodox, his art may not turn out the way he would expect it to be, as he has to ignite his work before the final results emerge from the explosion. If I were to use a similar method for my project, it would generate a sense of uncontrolled randomness in my mark making.

Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings were amongst the first abstract art. A considerable body of her abstract work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky. Through her work with the group The Five, a group of female artists, Hilma af Klint created experimental automatic drawing as early as 1896, leading her towards an inventive geometric visual language capable of conceptualising invisible forces both of the inner and outer worlds.

Hilma’s art seem to consist of multiple elements interacting with each other, each with their own unique personality, be it shape, colour, or size. This creates a canvas of varying shapes and forms which can be interesting for my project.

Hilma af Klint – Group IV, No. 7, Adulthood

Emma Kunz

For Emma Kunz, each colour and each shape had a precise meaning in her understanding of the world, she regarded her pictures as holograms, spaces you could walk into, images to be unfolded or collapsed back down again, usually multilayered in their construction.

Emma’s works are precise, symmetrical, more controlled and non-spontaneous. A similar method can be applied to my project if I am looking for such characteristics in my work.

Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin’s early works included biomorphic paintings in subdued colors. Her signature style was defined by an emphasis upon line, grids, and fields of extremely subtle color. Particularly in her breakthrough years of the early 1960s, she created 6 × 6 foot square canvases that were covered in dense, minute and softly delineated graphite grids.

Agnes was a minimalist and abstract artist, her works focused mostly on the texture. Textures are an interesting way for mark making as they can create details which may be too complex to be done by hand.

Andy Warhol

Warhol’s Rorschach series is one of the few in which the artist does not rely on preexisting images. Inspired by the Rorschach tests done on patients, Warhol would paint on one side and would imprint it on the other side.

Warhol’s Shadows , grounded by a high-contrast, abstract field limited to 17 specific colors ranging from Day-Glo green, yellow, turquoise, scarlet purple and crimson to hot pink, cobalt blue, silver, a somber brown and black. It is unknown what the shadows are actually of.

The “Oxidation Paintings” is a series of “paintings” done by coating canvases with wet copper paint and afterwards urinating on them, urine which oxidizes and changes color.

Three works which are all very abstract, shows that art can be created by an unlimited number of ways. Something to think about when doing my project, but don’t worry, I won’t pee on my work.

Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu is an artist best known for her densely layered abstract paintings and prints. She is also known for her large-scale paintings that take the abstract energy, topography, and sensibility of global urban landscapes as a source of inspiration.

A wide use of colours, shapes, and lines. Very spontaneous and random which can be used to create some interesting marks and patterns.

Julie Mehretu – Black Ground (Deep Light)

Cy Twombly

Cy’s paintings are predominantly large-scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of mostly grey, tan, or off-white colours.

Brush strokes can create some unique textures which can be applied to my mark making.

Franz Kline

Kline’s artistic training focused on traditional illustrating and drafting. Over time, he developed an interest in breaking down representative forms into quick, rudimentary brushstrokes. In his later years, Kline’s brushstrokes became completely non-representative, fluid, and dynamic. It was also at this time that Kline began only painting in black and white. He explains how his monochrome palette is meant to depict negative and positive space by saying, “I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.”

Again, brushstrokes can be interesting as they create textures, which can add details when making marks. I can also play around with negative space.

Yves Klein

Yves Klein was the most influential, prominent, and controversial French artist to emerge in the 1950s. He is remembered above all for his use of a single color, the rich shade of ultramarine that he made his own: International Klein Blue.

In the case of People Begin to Fly, Yves used negative space to create the art. I could mask out a shape using an object and paint the area around it to achieve the same ‘negative’ effect.

Yves Klein – Anthropometry of the Blue Period (ANT 82)

Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford’s abstractions unite high art and popular culture as unorthodox tableaux of unequivocal beauty. Working in both paint and collage, Bradford incorporates elements from his daily life into his canvases.

Mark introduces sort of a graffiti style to his art, using exploding lines and blocks of squares, he makes these two completely contrasting elements work together on his canvas.

17/08/2017

Pascal Campion

Pascal is a freelance artist known for his vibrant digital illustrations, which are based on his everyday life and his family.