Assignment three: Written reflection

I found the research points really interesting, as the first introduced me to some designers that I was unfamiliar with and forced me to consider and analyse the colours they used and the effect these had on me as I viewed them. The second really helped me realise how differently colours can look on screen compared to ‘in the flesh’.

I think I have gained skills and experience in observing, analysing and recording the colour palettes present in both colour printed and neutral samples. I think it has heightened my sensitivity to colour, and in particular I am beginning to see the colours even in neutral textiles like carpets and natural surroundings, such as the sea-washed pebbles I observed and photographed on a recent beach walk.

I was surprised when I really looked closely at the materials I selected as both the colour samples contained more colours than I had realised when I selected them (and more than suggested in the course guide).

For the gouache work I feel I was fairly good at colour matching but did not really focus on looking at the colour proportions and could do some more work on this in order to understand colour palettes more fully.

The translation through yarn of the Old Master’s painting I think was quite successful and the colours I observed and extracted were very pleasing to me, as the blue I found uplifting, the yellow cheered me, and the bronze gave a sense of luxury and opulence.

With the watercolour observations of the still lifes, I need to do more work on colour matching and thinking about colour matching and proportions within the same piece of work – concentrated more on some colours than I should have. I don’t think I matched the more subtle colours as well as the more strident tones.

With the collage, I was initially a little confused and sceptical about using a photograph of a messy corner as a starting point and my first two collages were rather unconvincing. My third collage, in which the colours of the photo were abstracted into a stripe design using complex coloured strips taken from magazine, newspaper and brochure pages and was more interesting and I think this gave me greater freedom to reinterpret it in the collages that followed.