Research
My next project assignment was an extension of our last project, A4, the mandala project. This project would be incorporating color into our digital compositions for my mandala. This project is designed to have me further explore the development of dynamic patterns to include essential color vocabularies. I will continue exploring my mandala studies of abstracted natural and synthetic shapes by testing some basic color theory applications and definitions. As well as I will experiment with translating value color applications. Illustrate color’s impact on pattern and visual movements through observation, evaluation, and testing as it relates to your natural or mechanical abstractions. Plan composition organization through strategies related to essential underlying color theory structures. Develop and describe ideas through iteration. Demonstrate intentional crafting techniques digital applications and tools.
I started tackling this project by learning about colors. I learned about how large of a role color can play within a composition. I started to discover there are many different color harmonies and I decided to find five color schemes for complementary, split complementary, analogous, and monochromatic color harmonies. I now found these different values and put them into a chart to compare them between each other and figure out which ones felt most confident within my composition. All of this was done through Adobe Color and that resource can take a lot of the credit for my color research and everything I learned throughout this project. Adobe made it easy to research all these colors it taught me how many colors fell under each definition, what they meant and the differing shade applications that came with all of them. This made doing research really simple for this project because I was able to do all of my information grabbing in one place.
Iterations
I now decided on one set of values from each harmony and tested it within my mandala. With the majority of my composition being line, I decided to focus on line rather than fill and debated what colors would give certain lines more pop than the others to have them stand out. Each iteration can be seen below along with some experimentation with a background to try and make certain colors stand out.
Concept Statement
For my first mandala, I used an analogous color harmony consisting mostly of shades of blues and purples. The inspiration behind the mandala is water, wind, fire, and Earth. So, with that being said the feeling I want to be captured by my composition is a harmonious feeling. I believe that these values accomplished this goal very well. The composition consists mostly of lines. So, I had to find a way to make the important lines that form each design with the mandala pop. The wide range of shades of blue and purple made this goal achievable and it turned out very well. The brighter shades made certain lines stand out while deeper shades brought emphasis to the smallest detail and this contrast created a great composition that was not drawing attention to one area, but to the entire mandala. After experimenting with this color scheme with a colored background, I felt it was being too demanding and it was distracting from the actual composition that is why I chose to use the open white background rather than the black-filled composition. For my second mandala, I wanted to take a different approach. I had already used a combination of different shades within one value. Now with there being four different elements or parts of my composition I wanted to try and extract four colors that could be put into the mandala that still kept that feeling of harmony. However, after experimenting I did not feel confident in any value set with four different colors. Certain elements stood out more than others and they did not fulfill the intended feeling of harmony. After this, I decided to experiment with complementary color harmonies. This way I was able to take two opposite colors, but I could still play with differing, values, shades, and hues to keep the intended feeling. I ended up finding a color scheme that emphasized each part of the composition while upholding a harmonious feeling with a complementary color harmony consisting of blue and brown/orangish colors.
Production
After experimenting with all of these different types of color schemes I had figured out what route I wanted to go with each mandala. From these iterations, I figured out that although there are four elements in my composition, Earth, wind, water, and fire, I won’t be able to do a color scheme consisting of four different colors. So, I decided one mandala was going to be one color with four variants of it whether that meant changing the hue, saturation, or the value itself, while the second mandala would be a complementary set with two opposing colors and abstraction of hues and saturations between those two colors. After applying and experimenting with how I wanted to implement each color into each element I eventually arrived at my final deliverables that can be seen below.
Portfolio Project
View final project at Mandala Color Studies Project