Browsing articles from "December, 2010"
Dec
31

Color Theory Basics

By lauren  //  Art, Art Tips  //  1 Comment

Color is one of the basic fundamentals of art. It’s a pretty easy concept to grasp  but it can help you with your art when you’re struggling. A lot of art classes will briefly go over color and some schools offer classes just for color theory. Color is a very important element in art.

There is a lot of vocabulary that goes along with color theory, so for now I”ll just cover the basics.

First off, what is color? Color, defined in Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice, is the visual response to different wavelengths of sunlight, identified as red,green, blue, and so on; having the physical properties of hue, intensity, and value.

This is your basic color wheel. A color wheel is a chart that allows you to decide on a harmonious color scheme. This particular color shows you the names of the colors and a label that says whether they are primary, secondary, or tertiary colors.

Primary colors are hues that cannot be made by mixing colors. The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. You can not mix any color to get these. You can see on the color wheel that the primary colors make a triangle.

If you mix two primary colors, you get a secondary color. The secondary colors are green, orange, and purple.

Secondary Color Equations:

red + blue = purple

red + yellow = orange

blue + yellow =green

Tertiary colors are colors made by mixing  a secondary color with a primary color. You can see in the color wheel above that primary colors, secondary colors, and the tertiary colors all make a triangle.

The terms analogous colors, complementary colors, and monochromatic colors are use when referring to the relationships between the colors on the color wheel.

Analogous colors are colors that have similar hues. They are the colors that are adjacent to one another on the color wheel. For example, red and red orange are adjacent to each other on the color wheel and have similar hues – therefore they are analogous colors.

Complementary colors are two colors that are directly opposite from each other on the color wheel. A primary color is complementary to a secondary color. This is helpful to know when stuck for a color in your art piece. An example of complementary colors is red and green; They are directly opposite from each other on the color wheel.

To define monochromatic colors, you first need to know what hue and value is. Hue, simply put, is color; when you say something is red, yellow, blue, ect, you are referring to it’s hue. Value refers to how dark or light a color is. So, monochromatic colors are colors of one hue on a value scale from black to white.

Here is a diagram that will help explain what monochromatic colors are.

That’s all the color theory I’ll go over for now. I highly recommend getting “Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice 11th Edition” by Otto . Ocvirk. I got it for my basic design class and it goes over everything you need to know about the basics of design and art. It’s a good reference book. =)

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Dec
21

Starting Art?

By lauren  //  Art, Art Tips  //  No Comments

Hi, so the other day I was on Yahoo Answers and I came across someone asking for some tips on starting to do art. This person wanted to know about color, how to make things realistic, ect. Well I told them, there are some fundamentals they should look over before starting.

Of course, anyone can do art and no matter what, it’ll be a great piece of work because art is objective. However, there are fundamentals to design that my basic design teacher said “if in doubt, use the fundamentals”.

The Fundamentals:

  • Color
  • Lines
  • Shapes
  • Texture
  • Time/Motion
  • Space
  • Form
  • Value

Each of these can help you if you don’t know where to go with your piece of art. These are not rules! More like guidelines, so you can do whatever you want to make art. It’s important to know that art is a form of expression and that you should do art for you – it shouldn’t be seen as work.

What if I want to do art for a living?

Well if you want to go into design, or be a freelance artist, or just something that deals with art, the art you do should still be seen as fun. In this case, learning the basic fundamentals would be very beneficial.

I always tell people that if they want to learn how to draw or paint to whatever, is to practice! Art is a process and you should always try to practice. Also, I think references are very important. How are you going to learn to draw something from memory if you don’t understand how something is in real life? Like if you want to draw a face, you have to understand the basic measurements and look of a face. If you want to draw someone, like a family member, if you’re drawing from memory then chances are you may just draw a stereotypical face – just eyes, a nose and mouth. But if you want to draw your family member, you need to know what makes that person look that way. Don’t just draw eyes but almond eyes, or full lips – draw them and not what you think they look like. In cases like these, references help loads! I always use references when I draw.

Another thing I suggest to people that if they want to achieve a certain look when painting or in photography, is to look at other pieces of art work and try to recreate it. That way you can learn some techniques used to achieve the look and style you want and possibly come up with your own techniques.

The most important thing when starting to do art work is to practice! Learning the fundamentals, having references and recreating works of art you like will help you along your journey of learning art.

Dec
19

Photoshop Rap

By lauren  //  Art, YouTube Videos  //  No Comments

Hey, sorry I haven’t been posting a lot lately. I have a lot of art projects that I want to get done that’s taking a while to get done haha

Today I just found a video that may tickle the funny bones of those who are fans of Photoshop.

Check it out, I thought it was pretty funny and entertaining lol


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    Dec
    7

    A Scanner Darkly

    By lauren  //  Art, Art Tips  //  2 Comments

    I’m not refering to the movie with Robert Downy Jr and Keanu Reeves per se. What I’m talking about is the style in which the movie is done in.

    For my graphics design class, we did a project called “A Scanner Darkly.” What does this mean? Well if you haven’t seen the movie, a the look of scanner darkly movie looks like a motion graphic image -sort of like a comic book. It looks pretty realistic but in some cases you can see where the values of the colors break up. For example you can see where the shadows start, the middle tones, and the highlights in a harsh line. Let me show you what I mean.

    This is Robert Downy Jr in A Scanner Darkly. It’s a pretty good movie if you ever get the chance to see it but this post is about the art technique haha. You can see here clearly where the shadows are, the middle tones and the highlights. It’s not very blended – or blended at all actually – but it still is appealing to the eye and it looks like Downy.

    I really like the end look of this technique but I had some problems starting out. For my project, my teacher printed out a tutorial she found online for us to follow and we had to find a picture of good quality to turn into a scanner darkly – I ended up doing two.

    The first step in the tutorial was to make a black outline, which I didn’t do (brilliant right?), because the picture I had didn’t have a lot of black to make an outline but rather a lot of dark browns.

    TIP: If you don’t know how to do something and read a tutorial on how to do it – actually follow the directions.

    It was weird starting out because it looked like bunch of peachy, organey brown blobs of color all over the place. This is the photo I worked from – it’s an image of Kandee Johnson, a make up artist, and I found this on her Facebook page. In this image, she dressed up as Tickerbell from last year when she was doing Halloween makeup tutorials.

    Isn’t this photo so pretty? It was kind of colorful so that’s why I chose it…plus I love Kandee! haha she’s and amazing makeup artist and person. Anyway, haha, heres the end product:

    This looks low quality because I had to take a photo of the printed version of my project with my phone. The PSD version is on my flash drive with is with my friend whose borrowing it. I tried to lighten it up in Photoshop to make it look like it does in person haha. Anyway, my teacher really liked the outcome of this but when I did the outline (I went back after I was done and added it because I was afraid I’d get points taken off haha), the line under her jaw, near her hand, wasn’t needed because the colors already make it look like there’s a outline there. Plus that line just looks really crappy – it’s not smooth at all haha.

    This method of art reminds of me Vectoring which is pretty much the same technique…like I don’t know what differences there are between the two really. So I watched a lot of vectoring videos on Youtube when I did this project  and I looked at images people did on deviantART. I’ve noticed that eyes are very nicely done in vector. So I decided to give it a try!

    The original photo is not mine – it’s from a photo I found on deviantART and I can’t find who took the image =/. So if anyone knows, it’d be appreciated if you slip me a name! haha

    So I’m not 100% happy with how this turned out – the colors around the eyes look a little to blocky for me but I do like the eye lashes and iris. =) I had some trouble with the iris because it just looked so bloby and not like an iris at all but it turned out pretty good.

    TIP: With this kind of technique, it’s best just to keep going with it rather then stopping and starting over because if you’re not use to this kind of technique and more use to realistic (like me) then it’s going to look so wrong at frist but in the end it’ll turn out the way you want.

    So in conclusion, this technique as a pain in the butt for me but I got an A on it anyway hahahaha Here’s the link to the tutorial my teacher had us follow for this project: A Scanner Darkly technique tutorial.

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