“That space, that happiness had a color: rose-pink. The pink of the sky at sunset, a vast, transparent, faraway pink whose absurd apparition represented my life. I was vast, transparent and faraway, and my absurd life represented the sky. Living was painting: coloring myself with the pink of the inexplicably suspended light…”
César Aira
COLOR
Like every element of illustration, color should serve a purpose. On the most surface level, a color illustration has a better chance of attracting attention. On narrative and conceptual levels color can help to convey the atmosphere or contradict the viewer’s expectations.
The number of colors in use works similarly—the fewer colors you have, the more significance each of them carries. A B&W drawing with a single spot color can be largely defined by that one color. A couple of tones work differently—their primary relationship is with each other. Each additional color complicates this relationship, either making it more involved or more unfocused.
ASSIGNMENT 3: COLOR VARIATIONS
Observe the everyday and the extraordinary and document it in three color variations. Your pieces can be naturalistic or stylized, but they should come from close attentive observation of your environment. Let your thoughts take you where they seem fit to go, the main point is to take extra steps, not to settle on the first judgement and find beauty and strangeness in what you see and hear. With each variation try to uncover something new about the subject you picked—there’s no right way to do this and it’s best to examine every angle, to question the assumptions you have and to see the world from three new perspectives.
Focus on the concept for the thumbnails and try to come up with ideas that would work both in B&W and in color. For the sketches you can pick one of the ideas and do several rough color mock-ups. For the final you can use the same linework and apply different coloring three times, or you can have three different treatments, if the different color treatment calls for a change in drawing.
As with the previous assignment, it should essentially be the same illustration, done in three variations, rather than three separate illustrations. The change of medium may suggest stylistic or compositional shifts, but those should only happen naturally in the process of the creation.
Variation 1. Black & White. You may use grayscale, screentones or ink washes, but remember that the piece will be reproduced at a small size and should read clearly at any distance.
Variation 2. Black, with one spot color. Pick a color that contributes to the black layer and fits the concept. You may change your black layer, remove bits of it, replace areas with a spot color or delete it completely.
Variation 3. Any three colors except black (and very very very very very dark colors that may as well be black).
Format: 4x4” each, 3 in total.
References for various techniques and applications of color: