One day project - Experimenting with colour combinations

 Experimenting with colour and combinations of colour

For this one day project we started off with a blank sheet of colour swatches. The task was to experiment with what colours look good together and how they interact on the page. We were also encouraged to try combinations that we thought might clash to see how that can look and hopefully become inspired. 

Page one:

This was the first sheet I did and has a mixture of good and bad experiments. I really like the ones of the fruit and veg and the way I have used shadow to make them stand out. These are really small so it was difficult to get a lot of details into it. I find that on the lighter muted colours putting a strong colour on top is essential to make your illustration stand out. I intentionally didn't just stick to the colour wheel suggestions of what colours work together. Playing with negative space was well proved to be quite effective. Some of the simpler designs are the most effective for the space given. I made some of them designed around the name of the actual colour of the swatch as well. Overall I learnt that if you are depicting an image you need to use colours that stand out from the background, but if you're creating patterns then often the background and pattern look best when they are a similar vibrancy. This of course is not a rule though and there are endless combinations to try that can be very unique.

Page two:

On this page I decided to go with themes of the swatches; I looked at them and thought about what they remind me of in nature and then created images that reflect those scenes and work well as a whole palate. The first set I went with sunset scenes and colours. The most effective I think are the ones that have the really dark black over the top of the lighter warmer colours. These silhouettes make the scene really atmospheric and eye-catching whilst also portraying information about the scene or story. The less effective ones were those where I used greens and other shades, I don't think these really contributed much to the atmosphere of the work- a warmer green would perhaps work better as if it is casted in the light of the setting sun. I then move onto water, these I feel were less effective and I mostly stuck to the same colour palate. My favourite is the use of text on the dark backgrounds incorporating the background into the image.    The comments for the remaining groups are much the same, I did try some new techniques though including coming outside of the box which I think was quite effective.

   The main take away I feel I have had from this mini project is that certain colours complement each other but there is also more aspects to consider like hue, saturation, vibrancy and contrast. All of these can be used when pairing colours to create different effects for different purposes and understanding how they work is really crucial in creating illustrations that register with people.