Color Studies

Now for the real fun—I hope. After all those squares à la Josef Albers, this exercise is more along the lines of a real picture (exercises are from David Hornung's book, “Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers”—see previous posts). The parameters are to use 6 or more colors, each twice, in order to get the maximum color variety possible. I interpret this to mean use each color twice so that it looks like two colors. I don't think I did such a great job with the example above, but in my defense, there's a lot more to think about besides just color, i.e., shape, 2D space, and 3D space—which objects overlap others. I found it a real problem to get colors far enough away from each other to make them look different. The gray squiggle in the middle worked the best, partly because the green dot helps fool you into thinking it's green too. Also, size matters. I think the orange at the top right looks darker than bottom right because the square is so small.