Color Theory Project 1: Saturation

Posted by C.Locke / at 1:26 AM / /

I realized I have not put up any of my work from my Color Theory class this last semester. It certainly was one of my favorite classes and was very interesting to me how colors work together and how our brain perceives them.

We did a lot of exercises this semester to help prepare us for these projects. This first project was fairly easy, what was mainly difficult was deciding what to do. We needed to basically create a poster, but one using all fully saturated colors. My teacher for this class, Jeff Atherton, is pretty awesome. He helped me out a lot picking colors and whatnot. I chose to do my posters on sea monsters just because they're cool and like destroying stuff. And I really wanted to go with yellows and turquoisey blues, but with sea monsters that wasn't going to work. I needed angry, menacing colors. That's where the red comes in and it was fun.

All our projects this semester needed to be painted. I had painted with acrylics before, and they are temperamental and difficult to deal with, but I started to get the hang of it and enjoyed actually painting with acrylic, I did surprise myself a lot this semester. One goal I had was to do my best and stick with doing what I wanted, and it worked for me.

This project, I kept it graphic. So I painted giant swatches of a single color, then drew my own stencil, traced it over the colors, cut them out, and glued them together. Simple.

During the critique, when it came to my picture, I saw that the boat I had in the middle looked like a shark fin because of my last minute decision where I had decided to paint it gray. Everything else I like and my teacher did as well, and we mutually agreed that the middle (where the boat was) needed to be fixed. So instead of going through and repainting everything, I just scanned it and edited it on the computer in Photoshop. Voila! The final product is much better. :)