Colour Theory

151013 Tues.

As far as a designer is concerned, we all know that colour in design is very subjective. With colours, we can set a mood, attract attention, or..make a statement. We can use colour to energize, or to cool down. By selecting the right colour scheme, we can create an ambience of elegance, warmth or peace. Colour theory is a science in itself. (Sir Issac Newton was one of the first scientists to investigate colour theory.) Sometimes, something as simple as changing the exact hue or saturation of a colour can evoke a completely different feeling. Wondering what is hue? Saturation? Keep scrolling. :)

Hue

• A hue is any colour on the colour wheel.
• Hue defines pure colour in terms of "green, blue, red".
• Hue also defines mixtures of two pure colours like "red-yellow, blue-violet". 
• Hue is the name of the colour.

Value

• Value is the lightness or darkness of a colour.
• All hues can be made in all values.
• Adding white paint will make the pigment lighter; adding black paint will make most pigments darker.

Saturation

• Saturation can also be called a colour's intensity.
• A saturated colour is high in intensity, it looks rich and full.
• A unsaturated colour is low in intensity, it looks dull and grayish.

Secondary Colours

• Secondary colours are the colours formed by mixing two primary colours.
• Yellow + Red = ORANGE
  Red + Blue = VIOLET
  Blue + Yellow = GREEN

Tertiary Colours

• Tertiary colours are the colours formed by mixing a primary and a secondary colour.
• Yellow + Orange = YELLOW-ORANGE
  Red + Orange = RED-ORANGE
  Red + Violet = RED-VIOLET
  Blue + Violet = BLUE-VIOLET
  Blue + Green = BLUE-GREEN
  Yellow + Green = YELLOW-GREEN

Analogous Colours

• Analogous colours are colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel.
• An analogous colour contains one primary colour, one secondary colour and one tertiary colour.
• e.g. Yellow, Yellow-Orange, Orange

Tint

• A tint is a colour produced by the addition of white.
• The more white added, the lighter the tint.
• Tints are also known as pastels.

Shade

• A shade is a colour produced by the addition of black.
• The more black added, the darker the shade.

Monochromatic Colours

• Monochromatic colour schemes use a single hue (purple above) and then use various tints and shades of that original colour.
• They are very low in contrast.

Warm & Cool Colours

• The colour wheel also visually illustrates colour "temperature": warm vs cool.
• Vivid hues that bring about a sense of warmth are labeled as warm colours. This includes hues from yellow to red-violet.
• Hues that generate the exact opposite feeling are called cool colours. They tend to be associated with cool temperatures and relaxation. This includes hues from yellow-green to violet.

Colour Symbolism

1. Royalty

• The colour purple has been associated with royalty, power and wealth for centuries.
• Purple was the colour worn by Roman Emperors and magistrates, only wealthy rulers could afford to buy and wear the colour.

2. Freshness

• Green is the colour of nature and represents growth, harmony, freshness, hope and fertility.
• Green has great healing power and it is the most restful colour for the human eye, it can improve vision.

3. Passion

• Red is the colour of fire and blood.
• It is associated with energy, war, danger, strength, power, determination as well as passion, desire and love.

Assignment 2: Rule of Thirds

270813 Tues.

Here comes our second assignment of Principles of Design. :D

Assignment 2:

• Select a subject matter of your liking i.e. door/ window/ bottle/ cup/ bin/ shoes/ eye/ food etc.
• You will need to hold/ stick your frame in every shot as your 'view finder', using it to compose/ crop your shots.
• It is OK to take a photo with your hand or fingers in it.
• Shoot at least 50 shots to select 30 photos and create a short movie clip using a software of your choice.
• Give your work a nice title, and you may be creative and add subtitles or narration to make a story.
• Be sure to add your name and ID number at the end credits.

Before this we were asked to bring a 12 by 9 inches mounting board (leaving 1/2 inch on each side) as our 'view finder'. The purpose of the 'view finder' is to help us to understand the composition of an image based on the RULE OF THIRDS.

What is rule of thirds?

The Rule of Thirds is a guideline which applies to the process of composing visual images. It works like this: imaginary lines are drawn dividing the image into thirds both vertically and horizontally. Important elements of the composition are placed where these lines intersect. For example:

Composition & Design: Principles of Design

270813 Tues.

As a (future) designer, what we think about design usually has a direct impact on how we design. The principles of design is actually what we do to the elements of design. "How we apply the principles of design determines how successful we are in creating a work of art." -- John Lovett

1. Unity & Variety

• Unity: creates a sense of harmony and wholeness, by using similar elements within the composition
• Variety: adds interest, by using contrasting elements within the composition

2. Balance

• These two pictures are balance.
• A large shape close to the center can be balanced by a small shape close to the edge.
• The darker the shape, the heavier it appears to be.

3. Scale & Proportion

Scale

Proportion

• Scale is the real size of an object seen in relation to other objects, people, its environment or the picture plane.
• Proportion is the size relationship of parts to its entire work, and each to the other.

4. Hierarchy (Focal point/ Dominance)

• Dominance is about the focus given to a part of artwork.
• Dominance can be applied to one or more of the elements to give emphasis.

5. Rhythm & Repetition

• Repetition is the use of similar or connected pictorial elements. e.g. similar shapes, colours or lines that are used more than once.
• Repetition can create rhythm.

Composition & Design: Elements of Design

270813 Tues.

As far as design is concerned, there are many different types of elements that we, as a (future) designer can play with :) According to wikipedia, design elements are the BASIC unit of a painting, drawing, design or other visual piece, which include:

1. Line

• Line can be straight or curved, heavy or light, soft or hard, or a mixture of them all.
• Line can show movement, rhythm, textural results and even emotional effects.

2. Shape

• A shape is created when a line crosses itself or intersects with other lines to enclose a space.
• Shape is 2-D, it has height and width, but no depth.
• Geometric shapes: circles, squares, rectangles, triangles.
• Organic shapes: leaves, seashells, flowers.

3. Texture

• Texture is the surface quality of an object.
• Implied texture: 2-D art that is made to look like a certain texture but in fact is just a smooth piece of paper. e.g. A drawing of a tree trunk may look rough but in fact it is just a smooth piece of paper.
• Real texture: The actual texture of an object.

4. Space

• Positive is dark, negative is light.
• The positive space is masked in black in the second photo.
• The negative space is masked in black in the first photo.

5. Time & Motion

Type Me Again Peter Cho, 2000

• Any word or image that moves functions both spatially and temporally.
• E.g. carefully watch water, it's moving, splitting, falling apart and getting back together.

6. Colour

• Description: Hue - movement within colour, Value - colour intials, Chroma - brightness
• Schemes: Primary, secondary, tertiary, monochromatic, complimentary, etc.

7. Typography

Serif vs San serif

Commercial Script

Custom

Square Serif

Surrealism: Research

SURREALISM(1924-1945)is a 20th century style and movement in art and literature in which images and events that are not connected, are put together in a strange or impossible way, like a DREAM, to try to express what is happening deep in the mind.

The surrealist movement flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which thrived before World War I (Dadaism: an early 20th century movement in art, literature, music and film which made fun of social and artistic conventions). If Dadaism produced a committed socio-critical style of painting in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, artists in France transformed the Dadaist principle of the illogical, the irrational and the random in their painting, in order to reunite the conscious and unconscious realms of experience completely. They too no longer believed in visible reality, and were in search of an all-encompassing reality, a 'super-reality' ('sur', Fr. 'over, super'). Surrealism did not remain restricted to visual art, but found literary form as an 'attitude towards reality', that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in an absolute reality, a 'SURREALITY'.

The conviction that alongside the visible world there exist repressed areas of experience which can be called forth in dream images or hallucinatory phenomena and pictorial suggestions, linked an international movement of artists - visual artists and writers - in spirit. Their outstanding painter-figures were the Spaniards Salvador Dali and Joan Miro, the German Max Ernst, the Belgian Rene Magritte, the Greek-born Italian Giorgio de Chirico and the Mexican Frida Kahlo, to name but a few. In very different ways, they explored the realms of the Surreal artistically, but they were always concerned with 'replacing the real outside world with the reality of the mind'. 

Giogio de Chirico, The Great Metaphysicist, 1916.
Giorgio de Chirico tried to break through the consciousness-governed thought processes with a tension-laden, irritating world of imagery, painting highly unreal pictorial situations in a realistic manner. De Chirico named his works, in which supernatural forces seem to prevail, 'pittura metafisica' - 'metaphysical painting'. The Surrealists received crucial stimulation from the enigmatic magic-realist paintings that de Chirico painted as early as the first decade of the century.

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931.
For Dali, clocks, normalised instruments of measurement, represented the reality principle, while soft, 'edible' objects belonged to the pleasure principle. Dali's paintings show a connection between the perception of time and the perception of space. The clocks, flowing through space and time, prompt thoughts of the 'flow' of time, and give the impression of a time and space of memory dissolving into the distance, a zone invaded by the inexplicable, and one which unconsciously influences the experience of the present.

Rene Magritte, This is not a pipe, 1928-29.
This is Magritte's famous depiction of a pipe beneath which he wrote 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe - This is not a pipe' (but only the picture of a pipe), he wanted to prompt a thought process in the viewer, at the end of which his understanding of the world would have changed. For Magritte, painting was primarily an 'art of thinking'. With his confusing pictures, the painter called the relationship between appearance and reality, between painting and depiction, into the consciousness.

Rene Magritte, The Realm of Light, 1954.
Magritte questioned and shook the foundations of the order of things in his art. Dead objects have eyes, reflections disappear, nocturnal streets are spanned by bright day-time skies. The world seems to develop holes; the safety of orientation and the reliability of the familiar disappear. In many pictures Magritte achieved this effect by means of surprising combinations of objects whose materiality or scale has been transformed. Between these objects flashes a 'poetic spark', as the Surrealists put it, which means that the accidental, the sudden and absurd inspiration is invested with inexplicable meaning. A similar thing happens with Magritte's titles: they are Surrealist in that they have nothing whatsoever to do with the images. But associations sometimes help to span fleeting bridges over the emerging chasm.

References: Anna C. Krausse, The Story of Painting From The Renaissance To The Present, 2005