Josiah – Ego

A Heartland Christmas

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This was the first composition that I worked on and the beginning of my struggles. Up until now, I still think that I have a lot to learn about colours but this was a good start to have.

Colour Palette Choice & Meaning

I wanted to make use of traditional Christmas colours. I also foolishly attempted to use split complimentary colours on my first 3 frames. I made composed each frame in this set before adding the colours. I also made use of monochromatic colours to create shadows.

Other than the obvious relation that Red and Green have to Christmas-

Red was used to evoke a sense of passion and enthusiasm for the arrival of Santa Claus and the celebrations of Christmas. A deeper red was used to represent my mother for “a mother’s love”.

The colour green was used to compliment the colour red. The green used here is also meant to evoke a sense of life. Green was used to represent my father as he is the down-to-earth one. In this way, my parents compliment each other.

Blue was used to create a sense of quiet in the each frame. While the feelings about Xmas are quite lively and energetic, we spend time together in comfortable silence. This is especially true because we all sleep early. We treasure sleep very much.

Cream? Very light Yellow?: I thought about using white because it is commonly associated with Xmas, but Singapore does not experience a white Xmas. Instead, I opted for something different. I used this “cream” colour to give the composition a little warmth to contrast with the cool night sky and the cool living room.

The gold of the bells and baubles are such because that’s the colours that they normally come in. Also, the use of different colours gives off the sense of celebration and cheer.


David vs. Goliath (Bullies)

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Colour Palette Choice & Meaning

For this set, I wanted to make use of triadic colours. The most dominant colour is red and it is used to represent the danger in the first two frames as well as aggression in all the frames. I had the blue which is used to represent uniformity and sadness. The yellow and blue were mostly used in tribute to my own primary school which uses the same colours. Yellow often represents cheerfulness but in this, it represents youthfulness. Next to the blue and red, it represents the sadness and pains of growing up.


Sesame Street

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Colour Palette Choice & Meaning

For this set, I used mostly monochromatic colours with a a little use of analogous colours. Monochromatic colours of grey-ish green was used to bring out a sense of bleakness and depression. The analogous yellow was used to evoke a sense of hope, which was why it was used so sparingly. In addition, Oscar’s colour is in a particular shade of green, which represent trash and dirt.


The Perfect Pair

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For this set, I used mostly monochromatic colours. I find monochromatic colours to be generally more harmonious to work with. To make other elements stand out, namely the character of me, the significant other, and the priest (and also sock Jesus), I made strong use of vibrant, bright colours for me and my significant other. Because the priest is part of the church, I used blue to make him not completely pop out in the frame; blue also represents faith and devotion. Sock Jesus happens to be white to represent holiness and purity.

 

After completing this assignment, I feel more keen to experiment with colours because I have still so much to learn. This was a good kickstarter and I hope that I will be more conscious in colour decisions. In film, colour grading plays a big part in setting the tone. I need to get better at this.

 

Things that I have learnt:

Live paint (Illustrator) is pretty amazing – Thanks Kim for teaching me how to use this.

Paletteon.com is great.

Shortcuts with pen tool. (I have become more proficient with Ai.

 

Good job, Highsock. Maybe you didn’t score, but at least you failed and you learnt. You learnt something and that is the point of school.

Egoism – To make an omelette

You have to break a few eggs.

And break a some eggs, I did.

I wish that I had taken screenshots of my first try at working on the compositions, but I was really just trying out the pen tool in Illustrator.

As you can expect, it didn’t work out so well.

I worked on the Xmas composition first, thinking that because of the usual Xmas colours (Red, Green, White), I would not have to think about the colours so much. How Rong was I? I was so wrong.

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There was something about it that just looked bad. I could tell, but I just didn’t know what. I approached The Kim Nguyen of G2 for advice.

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She brought to my attention the use of colours as tones – something that we had learnt in Foundation Drawing while working with pastels.

She also showed me a couple of illustrations that she was inspired by and that got me thinking about illustrations that I liked – namely Steven Universe (A cartoon show). I chanced upon the artwork of one of the art directors of Steven Universe, Elle Michalka.

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With this newly acquired knowledge, I started working on the compositions, proper.

My first attempt at using a colour palette.

Using images from google as reference

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A more successful attempt with a colour palette (in my opinion)

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A great amount of time was spent making this tiny santa
Welcome to Palette Town.

Egoism – Ideation

This project is the one that I dread the most because I have huge difficulty working with colours. I just don’t feel that strongly for the effects of colours when I am using them. I can recognise good use of colours some times, but most times I just don’t feel that strongly for that one type of red over the other type of red. Woe is me.

For this project, my main objective is to be able to create harmonious compositions in terms of use of colours.

I will be using illustrator because that is the only medium I know where you can cmd+z.

To start off, I based all depictions of characters off my instagram name: Highsock. (A name that people in G2 have come to associate me with)

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Credits to Adithi

From there, I did mindmap of potential ideas; some more dark than others.

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After this, I decided on my final four equations.

  1. Me in Primary School
  2. Me having Xmas with the family
  3. Me in love
  4. Me in Sesame Street