Victoria Geary's Foundation year at Ravensbourne: Graphics Pathway Colour and illustration workshop

Today the workshop was labelled as colour and illustration and it was today that I was able to develop these skills. Although I have learnt about colour theory and the colour stages I haven't done it in some time therefore todays workshop acted like a refresher for the subject. The day allowed me to appreciate the different techniques in getting different colours as well as shades of brown. Some of the problems that were raised was how some of the colours once mixed looked the same, in order to overcome this problem I made sure I made a lot of the paint so that all I had to do was add the right amount of paint instead of mixing from scratch.

After the colour session at the beginning of the day we were asked to create 3 illustrations in a 20mm square using only the three rows of brown shades seen above. I did find this task really fun to design however when it came to choosing the colours I found it quite difficult. The lack of colour was hard to overcome because I kept wanting to make certain elements stand forward. Because of this challenge I was able to appreciate the colours and select carefully the ones which would work better than the others. I personally feel this workshop was really helpful in sustaining the colours within the illustrations and hopefully throughout the whole of my future work. Colour is a huge part of Graphic Design and being selective is vital- this is already something that within my work I have identified as really important. Therefore focusing my illustrations around one certain tone of colour meant I was able to use the colours to create an illustration with a conscious choice of what specific colour. This is something important to consider because in the future when working with clients they may ask me to use certain colours only, this is good practice.