Designers & use of colour – Colour Research Point 1

Voyage Decoration is a home interiors company.  They have different collections to suit a variety of tastes and styles, but the designers seem heavily inspired by nature as the collections reflect this.  The way they control their use of colour differs from collection to collection.  The voyage couture and natural living ranges tend to be mostly monochromatic in greys and natural colours using metallic and texture for accents so here the design is highlighted and perhaps the most important feature.  Other collections which are strongly connected with nature, use this as a basis for their colour schemes and palettes.  This is where the design and colour scheme become interdependent, with each aspect being as important as the other.

Marimekko is a Finnish design house producing clothing.  Their designs are simple and quite geometric in shapes.  Their signature seems to be simplicity when it comes to colour, using monochromatic colour palettes with accent colours (in this case orange and pale pink).  Pattern and texture on the clothing is minimal allowing them to control the use of colour.

Mary Katranzou is a fashion designer who uses bold colours, stripes and pattern to create contours and shapes in her clothing designs.http://www.marykatrantzou.com/collections/ready-to-wear/pre-fall-2016/runway  There were a lot of this designers pieces that I thought had a great use of colour, however I chose to look at this one because it was a really good example of the way the use of colour and design links together to create the shape and appearance of the garments.  The use of the light coloured edging draws our eye to give the appearance of perfectly balanced shoulders and hips.  The red colour and shading on the jacket although printed give a textural 3D effect combining with the vertical wavy lines on the blouse to create height/length. The designer shows us here how the use of pattern and colour in clothing can change the appearance of body shape, and the controlled use of minimal colours accentuates this.  Here, the design and colour use go hand in hand, as different colours would alter the appearance of shape and size.

Wallace Sewell are a British design duo producing woven scarves, throws and cushions.  They use blocks and stripes of colour and geometric patterns in their woven products and use these shapes to control their use of colour.  There seems to be a theme of using complimentary colour schemes for accent in various palettes.

Cole & Sons produce designer wallpapers.  As with interiors, there are lots of different collections depending on style, taste, colour palettes and schemes.  There are William Morris style prints and Esher inspired wallpapers, and modern geometric designs.  There was one design that caught my eye because of the use of colour.

cole & sons geometric wallcovering

With simple use of vertical and diagonal stripes the layers of colour create the diamond and triangular shapes.  The colours interact with each other in such a way that give a three dimensional effect.  Each layer of colour is important as without it we would not have the geometric shapes that give us the end design. This would require extremely careful colour planning from the designer so in this sense both colour and design are interdependent.  This piece of design is almost like a lesson in colour mixing and it is fascinating studying it and trying to figure out how the colours were layered up!

Norma Starszakowna creates hanging textile installations.  She works with silk organza and uses historical buildings and walls as her inspiration with many of her pieces including graffiti and text.  Her colour use is taken from the natural hues she observes, so uses a lot of earth tones and greys with the use of shading and texture too produce accents and points of interest.

Paul Smith – clothing and accessories designer.  S/S16 Collection – Uses mainly dark colours for the capsule collection with the use of primary colours for accent.  The designer extends the primary colour palette to include green, orange and turquoise and controls the colours by keeping them in blocks and accessorising with the dark to create impact.

Vlisco is a company I have encountered before in an earlier part of the course.  They are a Dutch company produceing wax resist prints inspired and designed for the African market.  Due to the processes involved in the printing  and layering up of colours a lot of the designs seem analoguous.  Other patterns have a triadic colour scheme, with geometric patterns and inspiration coming from African national colours.

Ptolemny Mann is a designer that creates hand dyed and woven pieces for the home, and creates installations for corporate and business use.  She seems to use complimentary colour schemes, she dyes the fabrics so they gradually change or fade and give a ‘dip dyed’ effect so explores shades of the same colour.  She also uses geometric designs with triadic colour schemes in various colour palettes,

 

Online Colour Apps Colour Research Point 2

Looking at online digital colour resources was quite interesting.  I think that the resources I looked at are something that would be useful for me as I progress through the course and will use this research as a point of reference depending on the project at hand.

Adobe Color CC

My first impressions were ‘What am I supposed to do!’  After clicking around for a bit and getting into the swing of things though, I found it was a relatively easy tool to use for making colour palettes in any format you want.  It was quite easy to pick colours and generate your own custom palette, or generate colour schemes based around your first colour choice, i.e. complimentary, monochrome.

Mudcube Colour Sphere

Although similar to the Adobe sphere, this tool gives you the colour numbers and allows you to manually adjust the hue, luminance and red,green,blue balance.  I can see this tool being useful as a learning aid, showing how to balance your mix of primary colours to achieve a certain hue.

Color Hailpixel

Quite a fun way to build a colour palette if looking for inspiration, point and click.

Color Hunter

Here you can get a colour palette from an uploaded image, I couldn’t get it to work however but it could be good if you are trying to colour match.

Colrd

Quite a nice application for sharing ideas and colour palettes across the web, you can also create colour palettes from pictures. Good for getting inspiration.

Extending the Pattern of a Fabric Sample

After sticking the fabric onto my heavyweight paper I sketched out the pattern that I was going to paint before mixing the colours and testing them out next to the fabric.  I’m really pleased with the outcome.  It was hard to tell whether the colours were alright until the paint had time to dry out properly, but I found this sample pretty straightforward although close up on the painted sections you don’t get the close woven texture that you see on the fabric.

With my next natural coloured fabric I wanted to get the detail of that texture because that was why I had chosen it as a sample in the first place.

This piece took a few attempts.  I would get the colour right, but then not get the texture coming across in the painting, and then get the texture but the colours were wrong! I eventually managed to produce something I was happy with and this is the result.  The colours aren’t spot on as I found it very difficult to replicate. The layers of woven cloth are so close to each other that they effect the way the colour appears depending on how closely you look.  It did say in the brief to try and be creative with the way you extend the pattern, but as I found the painting challenging I decided to keep it simple.  Overall I’m pleased with my attempt, I would perhaps like to try and produce this again at a later point and get a better colour match.

 

Choosing fabric samples and colour matching.

Starting out I found that finding materials was more involved than I thought. Finding fabrics that only had a few colours was quite difficult and also I had in mind that I would also have to paint and extend the pattern of the fabrics, so didn’t want to get anything that was beyond my painting capabilities.  I’m not confident with painting as a whole so didn’t want to overcomplicate things.  I managed to find two samples with colour and another two neutral fabrics with an interesting texture/surface so began mixing colours to try and match them up.

My first attempts were ok, but not right so I decided to make a little bit of time to research colour mixing and leave the samples alone for the time being.  I started reading ‘Colour, a workshop for artists and designers’ by David Hornung and did some of the first exercises with my primary and co-primary colours. I made achromatic greys and darks, mixed them with primary colours to see the affect it had on the hue and vibrancey.  Doing this changed the way I saw the colours in my fabric samples, and how I could achieve them.

I drew out my squares and started mixing colours, using the darks and greys I had produced earlier and got some really good results, also a lot of not so good ones! The colour samples were pretty straightforward once I got going but when I got to the natural fabrics it seemed to become a lot more difficult again to get the colours right.  In the end though after a lot of perseverance I think I have got a good result with the colour matching and am pleased with the layout.