Thinking about my colour studies

Creating gradients 

Once I had moved away from my value studies and had done a little bit of image research to help me feel inspired for citadel I would be designing, I started to think about what I would have to do to create my colour studies. I knew that they were going to be based off of the value studies I had completed recently but as I want so keen on these thumbnail designs I knew I had to think of a way to make then far more interesting and creative when I added colour. There was also something else I knew I had to bare in mind whilst creating these pieces and that is that a big chunk of this Art Test revolves around the feel and mood that the final pieces captures and also having to consider factors such as what time of year or day the 'screenshot' is from. 

I knew that light, composition and mood of the final pieces were all really important things that I had to to include in the design process so I had to make sure that I had variety in each image which meant including a different time of day and possibly season to make each environment stand out and not look to similar to the last. I was just about ready to start working on my colour studies when one of my fellow students, Grace, showed me a technique that our tutor had showed her in one of her lessons. It was a technique we could use to help us breakdown and understand the colours used in a scene and a way to get a far more interesting colour palette to work from. Basically the idea was that you grabbed a photo of google images with interesting lighting or colour and then made a gradient of it. This was done by using the gradient tool in Photoshop and then fiddling around with the colour wheel and sliders provided to match up the colours with the ones in the photo you had selected. I have to say that I actually really enjoyed doing this process as I was allowed to take a break from working in a rough style and do something detailed and accurate. 

Below are examples of the different gradients I used whilst using photographs of different lighting and environments for reference. Now that the gradient studies have been produce I can move onto creating a few colour studies using these new colour palettes to help created different moods for each image.