DESIGN PRINCIPLES - WEEK 4

 DESIGN PRINCIPLES - WEEK 4

April 28th (WEEK 4)
NG VEYHAN (0349223) / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
EXERCISE 4


Lecture Notes:

For this week, Dr. Charles explained to us examples of harmony and unity by analyzing these aspects from various works by online artists that we admire. He explained that each element in an image has a purpose in bringing the entire piece together. In addition to the lecture today, Dr. Charles also introduced us to a game-esque system to get a general idea of our progress.

From what I gathered from the lecture, my understanding of each of the two terms are as follows:

Harmony: The elements of an image sharing a common theme, having a similar features. As such the elements do not clash with each other visually. While it is not necessary for the elements to share many common features, there should be some one or two aspects that are similar to show grouping of the elements.

Unity: In contrast to harmony's definition of a common theme, unity is the ability for said elements in an image to come together into a cohesive result in the overall image, instead of an element to element basis.


Practical:

Visual Research for Harmony

(Fig 01 - 02, Pinterest Reference Images, 28/4/2021)

When browsing Pinterest for some inspiration for my final piece, I came across this picture of Roman Legionnaires as chest pieces, and I found that the lighting in this image combined with the repetitive nature of the pieces of these chess pieces combined with the slight variation due to lighting really makes the image pleasing to look at. The other pictures of these plants for chess pieces was an interesting concept but I was still trying to make heads and tails of how these pieces could be distinguished.

Idea Exploration for Harmony

Going out on a tangent, as a young child I liked to go out and play around at a nearby grass field. Often I would also bring along various toy figures and even seashells that I found during the occasional trip to the beach. Such memories are now very distant and vague, but I was still fond of said times. I wanted to reflect something similar in the piece that I created for this week. Recalling solely from memory, it was just a collection of random objects threw together willy-nilly. As such, I needed to switch around the subject to something more suitable for this weeks theme.

Final Outcome (Harmony)

 
(Fig 03, Harmony Sketch, 28/4/2021)

(Fig 04, Harmony Basic Colour, 28/4/2021)


(Fig 05, Harmony Final, 28/4/2021)

The final result of this piece, admittedly, did not come out as well as well as I thought, much to my amusement. Due to the nature of watercolour and how it interacts with water and binds with the paper, even using undiluted paint over a dried coat of green still resulted in a translucent effect rather than a pure, solid white. The colours were a bit saturated compared to something I'd see in real life, especially with the use of yellow for lighting resulting in many lime green tones.


Visual Research for Unity


(Fig 06 - 07, Pinterest Reference for Unity, 30/4/2021)

Idea Exploration for Unity

I was pretty hungry when I was researching this topic. I was intrigued by how many (or even the majority) foods have a brown-yellow sort of colour palette, rather than vibrant, saturated cool colours. As such I wanted to create a food spread with a common colour theme in an image. I personally also enjoy making desserts and baking, as such thinking of what foods could look good together wasn't difficult. Browsing Instagram for material, I realised that many of these posts about food have just extravagant portions or just food with shock value. Looking up Pinterest provided me more "grounded" food ideas as normally they're part of homemade recipes. 

Final Outcome (Unity)

(Fig 08, Unity Food Sketch, 30/4/2021)

(Fig 09, Unity Food Final, 30/4/2021)

Compared to the image I created for Harmony, I think this one came out much better. I tried to control the saturation of the colours by using water rather than adding paints with different tone. The sharp bright light created by light reflecting off sharp angle did prove to be challenging to render properly. I did feel that the subject (the pancake) was slightly hard to distinguish on its own and therefore I tried to add the caramel coffee, maple syrup and a glass of water to give some context to the image. The similar colours that all these foods share did lend itself to the cohesiveness of this image.


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