Project 3 - Colour -

Stage 1 Introduction and Preparation

I'd always known about primary colours and secondary colours. I'd never even thought of tertiary colours and if I had, I wasn't aware that's what they were called. Or even what combinations were needed to make those. To me, greys were usually made by mixing black and white or browns were made by generally mixing together several colours if a ready made brown wasn't available.

This section has taught me how to see colour differently for sure. Where I might call a colour 'intense' or 'vivid' I now know the word for that is 'Saturation'. I also know that 'Unsaturated' refers to those smoky colours, the muddier and more greyed down colours.

I'm not confident with colours. I'm that person who goes for an eye test and is worried whether I'm giving the correct answer when they ask me to say which is brighter - the green or the red? I love bright and vivid colours although if I look in my wardrobe, it contains mainly slimming black. When I have created pieces of art in the past, I have always gone for the bold reds or blues. Subtlety is not a word to describe anything I have flung at a canvas.


Stage 2 - Colour Perception - Exercise 1

I'm not sure that the photographs will show colours effectively but I think they still convey a little of what I saw when I looked at my colour compositions. Above, using the red square make the backgrounds seem much darker overall, than they are. This in turn makes the background colours seem cold to me.

Using the yellow squares brought out a lighter background shade overall...to me anyway. Almost like warmer hues.

In all honesty, I'm not even sure what I think of the grey squares. What I actually see, is a darker edge around the grey, so that on the green square, there appears to be a darker green edge around the grey. With the purple square, there is a darker purple edge around the grey and so on.