Exercises/Research
This assignment was started off with an introduction to basic color theory and several types of color combinations. I did a bit of exploration and playing with different color calculators to see things I liked, as well as browsed different social media pages related to color. I’ve always used a lot of pastels in my previous art but I wanted to stray from that a bit while still keeping a more graphic and soft feeling atmosphere.
This was our exercise in color and I found it quite helpful in exploring the different types of color combinations.
I found that I ended up liking the monochromatic and square color schemes the most.
Production
I started exploring color schemes and playing with adobe color to help me get started and find something I liked. I started by doing my man made piece, since that was the one I was less sure about coloring.
This was my first draft coloring it and I had ended up really liking the colors I had chosen for it. I went with an analogous scheme for this one with a relatively wide arc, as I wanted to keep everything close and related in a way, just as all the represented objects in the piece are close and related.
I was essentially done on this one other than fixing a few areas where I had put the wrong co9lor by mistake, so I took it back into adobe illustrator and fixed that small issue to complete this mandala.
For my second mandala, I luckily had made the preface to my analogue piece in a digital vector format, so I just took that and used it as my second colored mandala.
Rather than going with analogous this time, I went with a square color scheme, as that had been one of my favorites in the exploration. It also allowed me to represent some of the objects and create a very vibrant and dynamic piece which I was a fan of. This first drafty ended up being my final as well, I did some minor tweaking and moving around colors while I was working on this first rendition but for the most part I was entirely happy with it the first go around.
This was the point where I realized that I had needed to make two different colored versions of one of my designs, so I chose to stick with the nature based one for the snow third coloring. I thought the design might look pretty interesting in a monochromatic scheme so I went with a deeper purple as my base color and got my more dulled out and darker tones from that.
I ended up changing the background and linework to white as well, I think it gives t a sort of stark cold feeling, which is the same feeling I got from the purples as I was first discovering the color scheme. I really like how it turned out, it feels very simple but with a lot of intricate detail in it and the overall cold and darker feeling of it adds a bit as well.
This project was super enjoyable and simple to me, I had a lot of fun just messing around with different color schemes and making something that looked really pleasing to me.
Final project: Mandala Color Studies