Foundation Degree in Calligraphy / week #13

So, as planned this week we went to The V & A to study a painting in order to evaluate colour content and proportion. After a short tour around the Indian gallery, and an introduction to the project, we set to with a picture of our choice. Here's the one I chose...

Foundation Degree in Calligraphy / week #12

Following our first venture into colour exploration, we are using 'saturation of hue' to evaluate colour percentages in an image. As if that weren't a difficult enough task for a duffer like me to grasp, there is no 'image' but we have to apply these theoretical gymnastics to a piece of prose!

This is challenging in the extreme to me... but amazingly I come up with something that I am mildly pleased with, and more importantly, seems to please my tutor. From here we will be going to The Victoria & Albert Museum to repeat this process with an actual picture... this is what is commonly known as 'taking it to a whole other level'.

Foundation Degree in Calligraphy / week #11

A new term starts, and we are studying colour as part of our second module; 'Language of Calligraphy and Design'. Hazel takes us through some basic colour preparation and instruction, and then its time to mix paint!I realise quite early into the session that colour is my achilles heel... a weak point whenever I approach a design project. I think I rather arbitrarily 'choose' a colour that I 'like', rather than thinking through the reasons and objectives of the project and selecting colour as a contributory element of the whole thing.Apart from learning about colour and how to use/apply it, we are making colour swatches in gouache so that when we study individual paintings later on, we can match the colours we see and reference them against our samples.
We're learning about Saturation, Hue and Value, and we prepare colour mixes to demmonstrate various combinations of these aspects. It's amazing how differently we all approach this, even though we are using the same basic pallette.For homework we'll be attempting to produce images that repesent colour percentage values in a piece of descriptive prose. This will be a real challenge for me. Thankfully I have some good reference from Paul Klee to help me along!