Thursday 19 November 2015

Doing some basic artistic research

Light, shape and colour theory 



So over the past few weeks I haven't really been able to do much studio work as I have been spending my time of different equally important things. I have been doing a lot of research for my extended essay, making sure I have plenty of quotes and I am finding reliable information and sources as well as having a little bit of a break from all the work I have to do in order to catch up with my family and spend some time with them. As well as all of this I was suffering from a really bad bug i had caught for a good few days and I found that it made it really difficult to focus on work as I just felt so awful. But now I am back, well and happy and over the last couple of days I was able to back into the swing of getting some studio work down again as I really needed to do a good catch up.

One of the things I was told to look into by my tutors when I gave my presentation about my studio work concept was light, shape and colour in concept art and I thought this would be a really good thing to have a little look into before I started randomly jotting down some sketch ideas in case they became disjointed from what I was actually trying to focus on in my project which is essentially colour and mood/expression. I though that looking into these suggested topics would help give my design ideas a little push and guidance right from the beginning and so I started about my research. As I prefer to listen to things instead of read them I decided that a great place to start with my research would be to find some videos talking about each of these three topics that would be really useful for me to refer back to throughout the design process and that I could also learn some tips from. Luckily there are quite a few videos on youtube talking about colour, light and shape theory in design work and so I picked out a few that I thought were really helpful and interesting and have posted them below, along side some images, so I can easily find them again if I want to re watch them later.




Colour 









Light







Shape







All of these videos focusing on the different theories and visual examples to accompany them will be really useful to look at and refer back to when I am thinking about the design and colour scheme of each of my candy based characters and will hopefully help to make my concept a lot stronger. So after I had had a look at everything above a felt a little more confident in the theories they were analysing I decided that the best thing to do would be to look a little further into the use of colour theory, which is the topic that was most suggested for me to focus on by my tutors, so that I could fully understand how this theory could influence my work and how I could incorporate into into my design pieces.




Colour theory 


So I already know that colour theory is the method of colour mixing and finding complimentary colour combinations. It all revolves around where different shades are on the colour wheel, how these different colours can be paired together and how certain colours can portray emotions or moods. This is something that was taught to me in primary school so I have a fairly good knowledge of it already, It was just the case of reviewing a few things to see how I could possibly incorporate colour theory into my studio project. With this topic, although it is helpful to listen to someone talk about it or to even read about it, I think the easiest way to understand colour theory is by visual representations and so I had a little look on Google to see if I could find any helpful images and luckily there was a good chunk of detailed diagrams for me to look through so I was able to look through them all and see which ones were the most useful. I was able to find a good mixture of simple colour wheel images that explained the use of different colour combinations as well as ones that spoke about how colours can portray different moods and how this can be used in advertising. I have posted all the images I found below.











So after having a look at all of these images and reading up on the different moods that each colour represents I thought It would be a good idea to try relating these theories to my current character ideas and see how well it would work. Now although the psychology of colour is something I want to bare in mind when making my character designs, I won't be the be all and end all of everything I do as I don't want my idea to be too similar to the concept of 'Inside Out'. My characters will not portray one core emotions, they will just have a set mood, and their design schemes will not consist of one main colour, it will be mixture of different shades and combinations. I want my characters to be expressive not just through the use of their colours but also through their expressions and body language so hopefully I will not be sticking to firmly along the lines of Red means anger and yellow means happiness, I want to mix it up a bit.

I thought a good thing to do, after reading about the different moods that are linked to colours, would be to put down some examples shades next to the characters I had thought about creating as a rough idea of what their colour schemes could be to see if they worked well with the concept of colour theory. The colour scheme practice I did can be seen below.






Now as as I want my characters to have strong influences from different candies I need them to have the colour schemes that suit whatever sweet I have chosen for them so for an example the character who is influenced by chocolate will have a colour scheme that consist of shades of brown with maybe little added elements like caramel tones to give some variety but overall it is sticking to the overall theme of the candy. If think that if i  start colour coding my characters based off of the mood that certain colours give, for example red for anger and yellow for joy, I am going to loose element of my characters looking like certain sweets and that is something I don't want to happen. I think it will be much safer for me to portray their given moods via their facial expression, shape and posture instead of going into colour coding otherwise my idea of sweets just isn't going to work.

But the examples of colour schemes given above are merely rough examples to begin with and will obviously be experimented with and tweaked once I make mood boards of each of the types of sweets I have chosen for each character so that I can make sure I am getting the right shades down to begin with. So once I have completed my mood boards I will be able to move on from the research part for a bit and start getting some initial sketch work down with my characters as well as working in some shape theory to my designs.




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