Girugamesh

Mountain Mist- by Kaii Higashiyama, was created with an interesting Japanese aesthetic in mind - Yūgen.

Yūgen / yoo-ghen / n. (Japanese)

An awareness of the universe that triggers emotional responses too deep and mysterious for words.

Yūgen is an interesting concept, it's similar to what we as artists would like to achieve in our work, even though we don't always want the consumer to start having an existential crisis, it shares a similar visceral emotion to immersion, which brings out an individuals introverted intuition, which may be a part of their personality they do not always get in touch with.

Colour has a huge part to play in evoking a visceral reaction, an astronomical amount of humans go about their lives absorbing colour information, but not thinking about what it actually means. The painting above for example, such a limited palette, green - yet you can taste the mist, the fresh damp air, you can smell the trees, hear the waterfall, feel the wet bark under your feet - but it's just a simple painting with one colour, green.

Aliens

How does this make you feel? on Its own, and as far as the colour and composition goes, it probably doesn't create too many emotions, the emotion lies in the context of the image. In my opinion there are two types of immersive visual works, there are pieces that create immersion on a purely visual level, the colours, composition, setting, when a photo or landscape painting is powerful enough to make you feel like you are actually there.

The other type is contextual immersion, which the image above displays, in order to reach immersion (which usually jumps out and pulls you in), you have to consider what the image means, you have to start exploring the implications of the image. This is the Andromeda Galaxy, over 2 million light-years away, and visible to the naked eye under the right conditions, it has 1 trillion stars (That's 1,000,000,000,000!), most of which will have planets, how many of them will be able to sustain life? the answer is simple : loads.

And that's just one galaxy, there are probably as many galaxies as there are stars in a galaxy, what does this have to do with colour? nothing.

Or does it?

Which image do you prefer? WHY? - I prefer the one with colour, but the greyscale image is how we all see the distant universe through a telescope, every image we see of the universe outside of our solar system is "false" colour (sort of, it's actually representative of the physical properties of what we see), but these images are still beautiful, even though they are coloured "scientifically".

Do Astronomers colour the Hubble space telescopes images in order to strategically create mood? no, they do it in order to convey as much scientific information as possible, but we still find them beautiful - because science is nature, and nature is beautiful.

Thorsday

Another image without source, spotted this one to talk about contrast and dominance. this one is hard for me to decide, is it dominated by the blacks in the foreground, the grey/white in the background or the reds at the top? This piece has really nice contrast, a lot of work has gone into the composition, and it clearly represents the battle between good and evil, which is the greatest contrast of them all, an amazing piece of artwork.

lts b prtnts

Another random landscape from the bottomless pit of jpegs on my computer, there isn't much to say about this picture but I think it's a great image to show colour domination in nature. I had a look around to check out a few more similar images because there is a lot more out there where a single colour dominates the shot more, but a lot of them have been processed and/or are boring, this shot is interesting and doesn't appear to have been processed at all.

It's a shame about the over-exposed area in the background, but it also works for the image by acting as an white-yellow accent for it, green is the dominant colour, and you have brown and grey/blue as sub-dominant, without the over exposure in the background there would be no accent to give the composition contrast, intended or a happy accident?

UB40

For my first blog about colour proportion I chose this landscape photo, of unknown origin (from my personal reference). This is a great image in terms of colour balance, it is dominated by greens and blues but has been balanced with post-processing effects in order to bring out the more neutral colours. You could argue that it has had its saturation increased slightly too high. The photographer has obviously tried to push the orange glare of the sun, and the grey/red tone of the mountain rocks as far as possible in order to make the image as interesting as possible, but in my opinion this has brought the greens out slightly too much, carefully desaturating the greens would bring this image into harmony.

Green ring

This is an unknown piece of artwork from my collection, it kind of looks like kekai kotaki, so it might be him, I do have a lot of his artwork. This piece is nice because the saturation really brings the image out, the composition is arrange in a way to make the subject loom over you and appear dominant. The use of saturation supports this along with the strong contrast.

Cool post title #7

So I have no idea where this image came from, found it amongst my huge art reference collection, what I enjoy about this is the limited palette and the composition itself. Artwork like this shows you that you don't HAVE to go crazy with colours to have a piece that really works.

With this particular image it's all about your eyes being drawn towards the saturated parts, you instantly look at the creatures face, his eyes and his mouth are glowing, you then follow down his back, and then over his right arm, which is currently engaged in killing humans.

This image shows how saturation can be used to direct a viewers eyes to important parts of the artwork.

SHINY!

Pierre-Etienne Travers is a freelance artist who created this piece for Japanese game called Monster Hunter. This piece, very much like the last one I talked about has a great range of value, you can find what appear to be pure blacks & whites which people sometimes steer clear of, the extreme contrast on the "Rathian" in the foreground gives it focus, and pulls it out of the flat background.

Spaff

Nicolas Bouvier AKA Sparth whipped this amazing piece up in 3 hours, such a cold image - the contrast is lovely and the composition portrays a great sense of scale. I feel this would benefit from expanding the limited colour palette slightly, maybe adding something a little bolder in a very small amount to draw attention to more detailed parts of his work.

KON-TACT!!!!!!

Concept art for Guild Wars 2 by Kekai Kotaki, this artist has an amazing understanding of value and the vast majority of his work are high contrast, low saturation fantasy pieces.

This image in particular has a vast range of shades, the eyes are drawn to the mid-tones in which the monster comprises, then your eyes move down to the hero, and follow counter clockwise around the image from the blacks, up the high contrast arm, and until you hit the whites in the top left.

Tree Trees

This lovely abstract landscape piece is by Theo Dapore, it uses a kind of split complementary pallet where the blues and red/oranges complement, with the yellow and greens being used as split colours. I like the composition in the way that the sun lighting up the sky feels really warm but there is still a lot of coolness on the ground, the trees an mountains being very dark are also a nice touch.

Sincetta

This is a surrealist painting called "The Fireside Angel", by a German painter called Max Ernst. It appears to use a triad colour palette approach which complements the surreal theme by pushing a mixture of confusion and curiosity in the image.

EDIT : It turns out this image actually shares a similar palette with my 3rd week of colour theory work, which was a lesson where we talked about broken colours and we mixed 2 complementary colours into each other until we reached the neutral.

Salforis

First post is going to be a quick look at a piece of concept art for a game called HoN, this artwork has an extremely broad colour palette of Red, Gold, Green, Blue, and Brown. Looking at DotA 2's colour theory PDF, you can see that these colours adhere quite well to the rules.