Purple I have chosen to celebrate the colour purple, for purely selfish reasons as this is my favourite colour. First step – A mind map to provide me with a deeper understanding of the associations with purple.
I was surprised and intrigued to learn that purple symbolises spiritual awareness, I decided to first take this concept further.
My journey into the meanings behind purple and the spiritual awareness lead me to Asia, more specifically China. In China, the colour purple has a deep and meaningful association with spiritual awareness. The Chinese word for purple, zi, relates to the North Star, Polaris. In Chinese astrology, the North Star was the home of the Celestial Emperor, the ruler of the heavens. The area around the North Star is called the Purple Forbidden Enclosure in Chinese astronomy.
Spirituality in China To help me better understand spirituality and more specifically who the Celestial Emperor was, I created this mind map with my findings.
The Celestial Emperor
The Celestial Emperor is portrayed as a wise man of an older age. His face tells us that he wise. All the images I have looked at of him are all very similar with no significant differences between them.
This takes me onto the more mystical, spiritual side to the Emperor, with of course keeping purple in the forefront of my mind.
Purple – wisdom. Mystic and mystery. Power. Dominance.
Dragons add message of mystery, fantasy and power.
Smoky effect, swirling patterns, space/northern light in sky effect.
Purple with contrasting blues, golds, red, black and white add feeling and depth. They complement each other.
Governed the dragons and spirits.
Red, blue and purple dragons dominate the illustrations of Chinese dragons. The one that’s emerging from the wave is brilliantly subtle and requires a second look. I like that concept of a barely visible dragon at first glance.
Working with the myth of how the Emperor commanded the dragons and spirits. These images, like my previous inspiration images, follow the same theme. Mystical, fantasy images. Inspiring use of light, shadows and colour. Could work well with the idea I am beginning to form in my head.
Colour investigation.
I am beginning to form a few design ideas but before I proceed, I need to understand the colour choices a little more first. I have already noted above that popular, contrasting colours used with purple are gold/yellow and red. To me the red seems a little harsh and the colour charts below back up that in fact, yellow tones are the perfect complimenting, contrasting colour.
A little more investigation also confirmed that blue is a nice, complimentary colour to purple. This delights me as I feel really inspired by the images above that combine the purples and blue to add the mythical effect.
Before I open Photoshop, one more thought has just sprung into mind, terracotta!
Emporers and their terracotta armies
With the photomontage exercise still fresh in my mind, it may be fun to add one of these images into my mystical theme I have developing. Going forward – My main thoughts are, purple/blue complimented with a contrast of gold. Mystical dragons/spirits, Northern star and the Emperor.
My ideas
My first step was to find a suitable image of a terracotta Emperor that I felt would work. I then carefully traced the outlines with the paintbrush in Photoshop.
I then selected a cloudy, mystical purple backdrop. Inserted in some carefully selected dragon images and my Emperor sketch. I played with the idea of them being barely visible at first glance. I played with the opacity on the individual dragons to try and add different depth aspects.
Though I feel that I have made a good start, something is missing. Referring to my notes I remember The Northern Star.
I add a couple of layers to the star, add a motion blur followed by a gaussian blur to give the impression that it is shining bright in the sky.
Time for the contrast. So far, I have the purple working nicely with the black and white, but now I need gold. I experiment with the hue and saturation, and whilst doing so had the nice surprise of not only creating a beautiful gold, it kindly threw in a centre of blue too!
I tried out various placements for the star and I quite like the last one with it shining behind his eye. The white lines certainly make the image feel like it is in a more dominant position in the hierarchy level. But I am still not satisfied. Next, I experimented with applying embossing to the layer with some artificial shadowing. This makes the image stand out more, I am much happier with it now. Down the right-hand side, I also added some ancient script, very discreetly but a touch that also points back to the historic and cultural nod of this piece.
My finished design Though initially I was happy with the progress I was making, I took a step back, became very critical and decided it just was not working for me. Though the Northern Star had significance to the overall message, it just had to go. I did not fell it fitted in with my overall vision for this piece. To add additional detail I found an image of an ancient Chinese parchment and brought this in to the image, to add to the message that there’s a story to be told. The white outlines were cool, and very fun to do. But, too amateurish. I hid that layer to reveal the original image I had worked from. Added a hue and saturation to turn him a lovely golden brown, and hey presto, it worked! I like the juxtaposition of the live-action terracotta figure with the fantasy graphic element – it adds a playful context to the composition. After all the hard work and fussing around, I had a far more useful image there from the start and did not realise!
The day after I completed this composition, I returned to it and immediately observed things that I had missed before. The black void to the left of the emperor’s head imbalanced the piece. I scaled the purple smoke and moved it in the frame to allow the blackness to extended horizontally, proving more of a diagonal top left to bottom right division in the background colouring. The calligraphy blended well with the purple smoke, adding a subtle swirl that echoed the curves of the smoke. I was not happy with the dragon, as I felt that the subtle details in the original image were lost in the smoke layer, and perhaps were not needed. So, to maintain its features, but lose some of the unwanted detail I went half-tone with a deep purple and mid pink. In the final composition I went for hard mix with the smoke layer and dialled back the opacity and fill to give a more silhouetted effect, which also retained details in the wings and give a sense of light passing through the thinner parts.
This colour wheel of colours used in the final composition shows that there are no strong, contrasting colours within the purple and yellow/gold range. The obvious contrasting colour range is within the bright yellows into the lime/neon greens, but I could see no reason to use those because I wanted harmony in the composition. You might use these colours for text for example but the narrative behind this composition is one of an ancient emperor and the myths and legends of his time.
Here’s the emporer’s head in a stark informal context. The purples and oranges work very well together with this grey concrete background, where I’ve again avoided adding a constrasting green or yellow.
For the previous image I imagined the emperor’s head as a huge exhibition poster. He looks merciless and all powerful at this scale. Reflections If I could change any part of this composition it would be the dragon, which I did not make as subtle as I had intended. Ideally, I would like to improve my photoshop skills to be able to model the beast out of smoke. I wanted to explore the mythical aspects of Chinese history and separate this visually from the reality of the ancient artefact. Blending a smoke-effect dragon into that funky purple gas cloud would be my next step with this project, along with adding text if required. Through the whole task I was unsure whether text should or would be applied to the composition.
Aubergine moods and research A huge range of purple tones
Studio photo. Massive reflections. Green contrasts reasonably well. But bold enough?
More red wine colour than the purple I associate with aubergine. Love the curves but the shadows kill them in these photos.
Pinks and purples. The green looks a bit flat.
Aubergine mug. But look at the highlights and texture effects on the ‘colour’. Surface determines the colour
Pick a pantone colour for aubergine?? There’s such a range of colours in the skin.
What colour is ‘aubergine’? Laura Ashley
Pantone
Dulux
Resene
Caran D’ache
Colorcombos.com ICI paints
British Standards BS4800 02-C39 Victorian Plum / Aubergine Purple palettes
Hmmm…. Our expectations of the colour ‘aubergine’ span a range of purple tones and hues.
Exploring colour palettes Just tones of a dark purple. Nothing interesting here.
Some interesting colours, but needs some contrast or I’d die of boredom with this palette.
Exploring colour palette options with ‘aubergine’. Need a range of purples but also colour(s) to contrast.
Pastel greens are yuck. Pale and washed out. The right hand colour is interesting. Looks like 70s eyeliner. Soooo dull
The grey is interesting – not vibrant though. Lilac, ok but not screaming ‘aubergine’
Yes, the orange looks great against those purples. Contrasts but works together – natural tones.
Wow that blue in the photo! But it’s a cold colour and not a match to the positive mood I want to create.
I like this. There’s a confident contrast of the yellow-orange with the purplely colours.
Good for some sort of bleak industrial message. Not to show love for the aubergine.
Too soft and icy cold. Not vibrant, with the blues and greens sucking out all the warmth.
Too literal. The green does not contrast and looks limp.
Funky W African fabric. Loving the orange and purple interplay, with the white highlighting.
QR code mood board A standard and quite boring QR code. Longer web addresses make them more complicated
This is a more simple code with a shorter URL.
QR code in cross-stitch? In case he gets lost on the way home from the pub?... why not
Branding a QR code makes it more user friendly and aligns it with a corporate identity.
QR codes do not have to be dull. They can be coloured and can have curved elements without losing their function. I did not know this.
This QR code is uber complex. It’s visually interesting but also distractingly deep seemingly random detail.
Novelty QR code with garish RGB colours
The word Aubergine After thinking of the QR code I wanted to explore other ways to communicating the word aubergine I went to the collinsdictionary.com website and found aubergine in lots of different languages.
berinjela baklazan batlican
What would this look like? Boring, and exclusive – also hard to get the typefaces to cover all these alphabets. But check out the sound files… That gave me a crazy idea →
The sound of the word aubergine
My son was playing some annoying music but when I looked across at his phone it had some mesmerising colours on the screen. This is a ‘sound visualiser’. I suddenly had a flash of inspiration, linked to that really boring list of words from the Collins dictionary website. So I explored the world of sound visualiser apps.
Purple…. Suddenly feeling very inspired!
Sound waves
There’s money to be made in sound wave art. You can record a message and have the sound waves printed on canvas as a truly unique gift. Easy money, I reckon.
What does the aubergine word look like as a soundwave?
I could have used a microphone but chose to use a computer voice to sound the word ‘aubergine’. I used this text2speech website which creates audio files.
UK voice Harry speaks aubergine I found the cool website US voice Alice speaks aubergine
The sound waves shapes are similar but this one is less attractive because it’s more spiky.
Playing with the aubergine waveform Not sure this looks like a sound wave anymore? Abstract pepper pot??
I did all of these on soundviz.com
Cool but too fussy and detailed for what I want to use it for
omg yuck! Bland and scientific. nope
Final soundwaves On the soundviz.com website you can make your own colour palette, so I went purple.
Oooh. Chunky and purple and bold. I like this. The thin lines are not prominent. The white space might also be distracting.
Other ways to say aubergine
Nixie tubes (my OH told me what these cool, iconic things are called)
Morse code
Typefaces
I’ve been to some interesting places on the web in this project
A sample of some typefaces I explored
I love these old-fashioned displays and the way that they use simple lines to represent numbers. I really like the boldness of the second from bottom typeface, which is Arca Majora 3
It’s an old way of communicating electronically. Nixie tubes can also be used to create text. I downloaded a pseudo nixie font to explore this potential. Here’s a sample
The Nixie One typeface is the bottom of the sample. So this is my theme of communicating aubergine. It’s just dots and dashes but I like its bizarre unexpectedness I can use this in an image as a hidden message – not many people can read this stuff after all.
I like this concept
Braille I work with children with special needs and several are visually impaired. So many signs and everyday visual communication is inaccessible to them and whilst I was thinking about how to communicate the word ‘aubergine’ I realised that I had to use Braille.
From lingojam.com/BrailleTranslator
This is the word aubergine in Braille
I‘ll use the dots of Braille in my composition but will use an embossing effect in PS.
ASCII My other half saw me playing with Braille and Morse code and suggested ASCII. I had no idea what this was, so he explained in great length and I forgot to listen then looked it up. I found this web site which changed text into the ASCII numbers that represent it. Who knew?
So it turns out that aubergine is :
097 117 098 101 114 103 105 110 101 013 010 I accidentally stumbled across a website that can covert images to ‘ascii art’. I had never seen this before, but I will keep it in mind for future art. I made an ascii art picture of an aubergine. It is a bit crap tbh
Aubergine Planning
Mood boards and ideas I collected colour concepts and some elements for my composition in the ‘mood board’. This was an organic process, which went from an initial concept of linking purple to the gorgeous aubergine through to components that would feature in the image. I had ideas for palettes but wanted to explore them further, to ensure that the colours I used truly resonated with the theme.
Aubergine Colour
This project celebrates the colour purple and my motivation evolved into a celebration of the humble aubergine. My perception is that this is an immensely purple vegetable. In
the mood boards I explored palettes, but these were general purple-based colour schemes. I wanted to home in on this vegetable specifically as my research had shown that there is no single ‘aubergine’ colour - it’s interpreted by designers across a vast spectrum of colours.
So, to make my colour scheme more definitively ‘aubergine’ I ran an image of the veg through canva.com’s colour sampling service. I was expecting a rich range of purples but interestingly the colours generated were greyer and slate. Inspection of the image shows that this comes from its frustratingly reflective surface. So, I used a different photograph and this time I submitted a slice through the centre of the picture, so that the colours sampled were more carefully focused on the aubergine. This generated a rather attractive selections of purples. These colours are sorted by their contribution to the overall colour in the image, so are representative of the colour of the complete object. This was a valuable learning experience : you can’t use software to sample colours from an image and expect them to match your own visual perception. Shadows, reflections, colour temperature and lots of other effects can make the colours in a photograph unrepresentative of what we can see in reality. We can’t trust blindly trust computers to
give convert real world colour accurately. Indeed I’m not even sure of my new monitor is calibrated well so maybe the colours I’ve got on here are different from what you’re seeing?
Choosing the contrasting colour was interesting. The yellows and greens contrast with ‘aubergine’ colours. I tried lime greens (see the gradient in the image) but I had to push the tone to be very light to get the contrast effective and I was unhappy with the final colour palette, which looked too bland. So, I chose yellows and oranges instead. I’d already flagged these up in my mood board and noticed green did not contrast particularly strongly.
Orange added warmth and luxury (I was thinking about the classic purple and gold combination by this time)
What I like about orange is that it’s a more natural colour than gold. Gold also relies on reflection and its surface to give it’s impressive lustre, but I didn’t want to introduce textures in to my image so a purple-orange combination seemed perfect.
At this stage, having chosen yellow and orange as the contrast colours I opted for the following final colour palette.
Creation Elements
Aubergine Café
The aubergine
Not far from me there is a restaurant named after the aubergine. It’s not a bad place and I felt that in my purple homage to the egg plant I could recognise this local eatery. Why not?! (Celebrating the aubergine is weird enough after all!)
I wanted my composition to be a celebration of the humble aubergine but I didn’t want to use an image of the actual vegetable because as I’d already seen, when it’s photographed it may not look as purple as it does to the eye in real life. Yes, I could colour correct a photograph but having tried that it risks making the aubergine look artificial, and those inevitable surface reflections make it a real pain to get right. So, I opted instead to make a graphical representation of an aubergine. In my composition I used the curvature pen tools in PS to create an attractive outline shape (tweaked slightly from reality to make the curves as voluptuous as possible) and then filled it with solid colour.
As you will see the mood board, Covid-19 tracking has brought QR codes to our attention more than ever before. I have used them a few times in my work, so I decided to create a QR code for the Aubergine Café and build this into the composition. So, I dropped the url of the café in to qr-code-generator.com and some suggestions for QR code formats popped up. The standard format of QR code is quite boring and practical. But the website also had an option for one which rounded the square and rectangular elements in the code to produce this…
This is a crazy mosaic or randomly tiled floor in a bath house. It is one level visually interesting but functional, and of course really clever technology. The abstract pattern has no obvious link to an aubergine, so it’s an Easter egg in my design. It lurks, with the power to take the viewer to this (a bit disappointing) French restaurant. [I have to confess though that messing the changes I made to the final image stopped it working as a QR code, but that’s something I’d like to explore further in the future, as this technology isn’t going away soon]
As I played with the QR code in my PS space I realised that it enlarged well and that it could use it as a template. I had planned to composite it on to the purple surface space in my image as a subtle interactive element but instead decided to use its structure as a key part of what I was creating.
So, here’s the QR code on the base colour. This was the idea I had initially. I have not bothered colouring the element because it looks lame and turns this composition into a leaflet.
I enlarged the QR code then applied is as a cut out to the purple base, revealing the boring white background.
I put the ‘aubergine’ waveform behind the base layer. It is kind of lost and there’s foreground clutter making it hard to see.
I broke the QR code but cutting out the squares! They had to go because their aspect ratio did not work well with the rectangular image. Removing them clears the view to see the wave. Need to fix the white background as it acts as the contrast ‘colour’ and I do not like it.
I tried a range of colours but ended up putting a gradient fill in its place, using the pink and yellow that I had chosen in the palette.
I used a hard-light blend mode on the gradient layer. This gave me more control over the mixing of this with the waveform layer. As you can see, I also put a temporary hue and saturation adjustment on the gradient to experiment with saturation and lightness.
At this point I brought the aubergine graphic in. It wasn’t sure where to place it and considered embossing it in to the space on the right hand side of the composition, but I realised that I wanted to keep this area clear, to allow this block of colour to really push the purple theme hard.
After a while the aubergine ended up in the top right-hand square of the QR code frame. I kept the orientation vaguely diagonal but didn’t want to make it too geometric and uptight by aligning it directly across the corners of the square. I felt that as this is the only element of the whole image that isn’t horizontal or vertical, I had to be careful with it and try to avoid introducing angles which risked confusing the story visually.
Now I brought the aubergine text in. It looks comfortable in this snapshot. But it is also too literal. I decided to experiment with the text layout.
I’ve never done this before, but I decided to break the word up over 3 lines. Brave eh? The bottom left square seemed like its resting place, but it would have looked odd as a purely horizontal line of characters. I am trying to be experimental with text and I am pleased with the result. However, I wanted the Nixie lamp effect. At this point I realised that this typeface was not pulling off that trick. So, I hit the web and found a typeface that looked more like the Nixie wires.
Beon did it for me! It is a stencil font and with some imagination could be similar to the wires in a Nixie lamp. I used a tone lighter than the base colour for the type base colour. But it is lost against the gradient background‌
To make the text stand out I went back to my palette idea and picked up the orange colour then applied this as an outer glow layer. I give the wider view of it here, to show that it looks more prominent.
I brought the Morse code in as a text layer. Here is I’ve used a darker shade of the base purple. It looks a bit dank and lonely‌
So, I embossed it into the base layer, using the pink from the palette as the highlight colour. I chose left to right for the global lighting here too to although I was tempted to go right to left, with the yellow colour on the right of the image. However, this did not work as a shading effect.
I did the same with the Braille layer, but embossed upwards. I am really pleased with this effect. After this I also created the ASCII text layer and applied embossing to this too, again using the palette pink as the highlight colour. Finally, I added one more piece of text...
This is the finished composition. You can see here that I also applied a slight gradient of purple shades to the base colour. This gave the impression of a spotlight of light coming from the yellow and shadows being thrown by it. It also gave more contrast to the name I applied in the top right. You will also note that I applied a mostly transparent white box behind the bottom left text to increase the legibility by improving the contrast.
This image communicates ‘aubergine’ in four forms of written characters. There are two graphical representations of the vegetable and finally there is a QR code representation. And all of this is wrapped around a purple theme. I am happy with the composition as it’s rich in detail and the carefully planned colour palette seems to have a pleasing mix of contrast and complementary elements with a general theme of luxurious warmth coming through.
Sketches
61
Early experiments
I wanted to bring emotion into this image and make it romantic. So here I used a sumptuous lavender field as the background and masked it with a silhouette I found with the search term of ‘lovers’. Dodgy territory that… I used ‘dear Joe’ for the typeface and coloured it green as both colour a contrast and an organic colour which works with the plants in the background. There is some potential in this but it’s too unsubtle. It feels aggressive. The perspective and the image position don’t work and the fine detail in the lavender is distracting. Perhaps an oil painting effect or something like that to soften the detail? Overall, this composition felt like it wasn’t going anywhere.
62
This was my next lavender field journey. I applied a cut outs to lavender field image then cleaned it up to remove the noise. The sky was a bit poor. To soften some of the sharp edges I used halftones in the sections, using sampled colours from the image to get the right balance of contrast. I eventually removed the half tone because it knocked the energy of the colours.
In the travel guide on Marrakesh I had used geometrically perfect rays of light, and this felt like another candidate for that. This is an intermediate stage, before I have corrected the angle of the light where it hits the ground.
63
For the romantic feel I wanted to put a human figure in to it. I used a silhouette and coloured it a very dark purple then hand sketched in a shadow. At this point I just couldn’t see what I could do with the composition. I had no text to place on it because I wasn’t sure of the narrative here. So, I abandoned it.
I switched back to photographs and chose a funky rolling field of lavender. This is a passion project for purple, so I really needed it to pop out of this image. To do this I chose the middle-distance section of the field and masked it, then applied ridiculous hue and saturation and vibrance. I then inverted the mask and dialled back the saturation in the remainder of the image. This was to provide a more colourless and blander foreground for the text‌
64
Ever the romantic, I went for these words and comped in a couple of gold wedding rings, playing with the pairing of purple and gold that always looks so rich. As I write this I have fallen out of love with the ‘dear joe’ typeface. It looks so drab and badly proportioned.
I’d thought about perspective in the earlier stages of this task so decided to move the text to a more focal point in the page by letting the lines of lavender lead the eye. And to do something more interesting with the rings I dropped the long tail of the y through them. That’s supposed to symbolise togetherness, but I fear it looks more like a metaphor for being hooked in to a relationship… lol
65
A dry brush filter softened the fine detail in the foreground and increased the intensity in the purples. But overall, it is not a tribute to purple. The effect I wanted to obtain just did not work. The text needs to come up, it is way too low...
No, this is not good enough. We will not always have this. I deleted it.
66
I went simple. Generous white space which lets the purple pop out, with a saturation adjustment on the leaves bringing in much needed contrast. It’s a large high-resolution image of the tulips (not lavender, I know) and it scaled beautifully to being in the corner of the composition. I dumped ‘dear joe’ and went for a more attractive cursive typeface, although as you can see the connectors could use some manual adjustment. I used aggressive kerning, so maybe that is the reason?
Ok, here I masked the flowers and brought in my romantic metaphor. I hope it is obvious.
67
A band behind the flowers was meant to add some variety to the white space, which I felt was too basic. And some smaller text added an even more romantic splurge. I stepped back from the monitor and thought this was not up to standard. It’s too simple and there’s not much more I can do with it. There’s nothing wrong with uncomplicated but this felt like a cheap birthday card. At this point I decided that I had to go back to the drawing board with the lavender field and let the purple scream out.
68
‘Lavender Love’
My purple worship images need to emphasise its richness and warmth, but the sky feels cold, and more fake the longer I look at it! The sky would be the first part of the composition to go.
Planning I revisited my boards and sketches. I definitely wanted a landscape for this purple celebration and from my mood boards I had homed in on the warmth (in heat and colour) of a lavender field in summer. I did not want to dominate the composition with someone else’s photograph. I wanted it to sit in the image as a thought-provoking mass of purple and to be part of a narrative. Inspired by real world events I chose this to be a story of love. To create the atmosphere, I decided to include a significant text element but from the beginning planned it to be subtle in form but powerful in message. I started with the words. These motivated me to add the contrasting colour of orange to the clothes of the person in the photograph. I would start with, er, landscape format but look at using portrait afterwards to see if there were visual advantages. For this image, my base colour is provided by the purples in this image. When I saw this photograph, I knew I wanted to work with it because of the uncluttered horizon (probably shopped?).
69
I want a dream theme in this image and a white background seems appropriate for the soft and uncertain world of the halfremembered dream. I removed the sky from the photograph. I did not want the photo to be full screen, as it is not the whole story, so to start with I left the image at this size.
My narrative requires a character and obviously this photograph does not have one. So, I image searched and found a female figure which worked. This was a rough cut out. I dropped her in to the photograph, but her dress looked like a sack of potatoes, even when scaled into the middle distance. I also did not like the shadows of her arms and dress, which were hard to remove even with dodge and burn. So, she was dumped
70
Initially I liked this carefree summer image instead but no matter how I placed her in the field of lavender she seemed to be remaking the Sound of Music. I realised I had rushed in to choosing her because her pose was completely wrong against the low lavender bushes. She was originally in a field of long grass and that gave her arm positions context. In the lavender field she looked stupid to be honest. This was the raw female figure I chose to work with. If you google ‘summer dress in field’ or something along those lines you will be bombarded with hundreds of images of females in ridiculously fake or exaggerated poses. It is actually pretty sad. I liked this photograph because it was natural, candid and fitted my narrative. I had a bit of work to do though because I wanted a plain orange dress. So, I used the patch and healing brush tool to remove the floral pattern. I also had to flip her horizontally to match the lighting direction in the photograph.
71
In this rough image I have made no attempt to blend the female in to the scene and I have left her unflipped to illustrate the dangers of not aligning the lighting direction.
In the next step I applied a Gaussian blur to the female because she is not in the foreground. In doing this I am wanting to acknowledge the lack of clarity of the dream state. I am giving a gentle effect of uncertainty and patch together memories of the dream but removing razor sharp lines around the female.
72
Now I put a horizontal tilt shift on to the lavender. This again adds to the dream-like blurriness, I hope, and makes the slightly hazy (and not fully edited) female more of the focus of the image.
I wanted to emphasise the lack of clarity in a dream and to go beyond just a photographic representation, but in a subtle way. Careful examination shows that this image is different from the one above.
73
I experimented with various filter effects and eventually chose a Dry Brush – which you cannot really see at the size of these previews. It blends the fine detail in the high-resolution photograph yet retains the colour range in general. At a distance, the effect is hard to see, but close up as shown here it’s obvious. This is far less destructive and fake than other filter effects such as Oil Painting. It also has the helpful effect of blending the female figure into the composition and removing some of the subtle differences in lighting and image resolution that can make two composited photographs look clunky. I still was not happy with the messaging of this being a snapshot from a dream. We are all familiar with the way that people in dreams are recognisable but not crystal clear. Often their faces are a mental mashup of their key features but other details like their voice or clothes give them the character. In this dream the female is an echo from the past and as time makes memories fade that was the impression, I aimed for using the Lens Flare effect. I decided to put the main light source just behind her head and let the flare carry through the image on a diagonal and copy the direction of the sun in the photograph. After some experimentation I opted for a 35mm lens. 74
The lens flare effect lightens the image but in doing so it tones down and washes out the purples that I wanted to showcase. To warm the image back up I applied an 85 Warming filter at 81% density.
The filter does change the hue of the lavender, but I find its colour more natural now and there is more of an emotional association with scene. This is suddenly a balmy summer evening.
I was now ready to add the text. This is a first-person narrative and I felt that it needed a cursive typeface to maintain the intimate message. So, after a lot of false starts I chose to apply lower case ‘Romantic Couple’ to the words.
75
I thought this was my final image, but I was not happy with the text position. With such a simple composition I felt that the location of the type is extremely important, and I had dropped it in without properly justifying my decision. So, I experimented with different positions.
Here, with the text down low near the horizon there is an intimacy and a luxurious amount of white space. But I am not sure if the this would work as a poster or large photograph.
76
With the text surrounding the female figure the composition is swamped and claustrophobic.
Now everything is left side dominant and seriously unbalanced.
77
This is calmer. But the left-hand edge of the text is sharp and creates a virtual vertical line that makes no sense. Or am I seeing things now?
Too close to the top, the white space above and below the text has the wrong proportions. The text looks abandoned.
78
I chose to be more methodical and see if there is a symmetry in where the text is placed that makes its location more obvious. I chose the bottom of the figure as my vertical and horizontal displacements for the text. Drew some boxes on the image then mirrored them in the top right and aligned the text to it. Does this work better?
I felt that maybe the edge of the lens flare is a better horizontal scale to set the text off from so I used that and the top of the girls’ head. This brought the text down and out a bit. And this also balanced the amount of white above and below. I love it!
79
80
81
I still was not fully satisfied that my final composition had the right proportions. I wanted to see if it would look better in portrait. To make this image I reflected on my mock-up bedroom poster. In that I felt that the text was perhaps too dominant. The words are personal. They are quiet and discreet.
So, I reduced the type size and pushed the text more towards the top of the composition. In this aspect ratio the white space unevenness really works. It gives a physical distance between the subject of words and her dream representation below. To me there is more power in the word and image combination when their proportions are scaled like this. But this also shows how important context is to the composition. This made me realise that I would have approached all these purple tasks differently if I had known where and how the images would be displayed.
82
83
84
The Emperor
Homage to the aubergine
Lavender love
85
Reflections Researching these tasks produced at times overwhelming amounts of visual stimuli. This made me realise the importance of having well-defined criteria before searching for library elements. My sketches were invaluable in helping me to imagine the position and relative sizes of parts within the image. Mood boards can be fun to make but also at times believe they can be constraining because of a need to stamp collect ideas. Whilst I am learning to record my research and construction process, I find it frustrating to have to copy and paste ideas as it interferes with the dynamic and sometimes spontaneous exploring, we can do. Towards the end of this project I signed up to Behance and I love the opportunities that this offers for exploring quality images and pinning interesting ideas in to a ‘mood board’. I will be exploring that in the future. The key learning from this task for me was the power of context in defining the composition. For the lavender love image, it was only at the end of the creative activity that I had a sense of the impact of the text location and size relative to the rest of the composition. I explored placement and typeface size with an eye to balance and power in the piece, but it was when I made a mockup of it as a poster that I realised that the text was still quite dominating. I wanted the words to be gentle, powerful and subtle but seen from a distance they were huge and far too prominent. I was aiming for a secret whisper effect with the text, and while that might work on my computer screen when it’s just me and photoshop when I dropped the finished poster on to a bedroom wall the words were way too dominant. Because of that shift in message impact from the design to the installation phase I flipped my composition in to portrait format and used the additional white space that this freed up to shrink the typeface size and place the words in the corner of the image, like a carefully pinned private post-it note.
86
Aubergine helped me explore the concept of hidden details and being open to incorporate new ideas spontaneously, without worrying about destroying my plans entirely. It was purely by chance that when searching for a list of the word aubergine in different languages that I used a website that offered sound samples of these words being spoken. And that somehow triggered a thought about ways to visualise sound waves when I saw my music on my son’s phone. The waveform I used formed a key part of the composition and helped me explore the idea of communicating in a range of ways, which became the theme of the image. This was a bit of diversion from the original plan but one that I allowed myself to follow. Again, once the composition was finished, I then had a minor crisis of confidence wondering what I had just made! I love it as a piece of art but what was I going to use it for?
87
Maybe it is a poster for a corporate meeting space, or is it for the wall in cafĂŠ? Does its final destination define its content and scale? For sure. So, here is that learning point again. I am very happy with the colour palette and the contents, but does it work where it is going to be placed? This is something that I will think about from now on when I start a new project.
The warrior’s head is a massive part of the final composition in the emperor. And that scale works wonderfully, from my point of view, when the poster is large and given the space to dominate and project the power that this chap had thousands of years ago. The contrasting orange and yellow look very powerful when seen in this wide view and I am delighted with the colour palette in the final piece.
Finally, one of things I have noticed in this task that my own writing changes dramatically when I am working. When I am distracted by my family needs and life pressures I write quickly and very differently from when I have got time to focus. I will try to keep an eye on this but the impact of covid and the changes in our lifestyle as we have moved through quarantine and into a new way of living have definitely squeezed my time a lot. But having creativity as an escape from it all has been a fabulous distraction.
88
References and Resources used –
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Celestial_Emperor empoere image https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ancient.eu%2Fimg%2Fc%2Fp%2F1200x627%2F972.jpg%3Fv%3D1569519772&imgrefurl=h ttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.ancient.eu%2FJade_Emperor%2F&tbnid=mkXosDONTZcN7M&vet=12ahUKEwj9w6bToqPqAhXu1nMBHQG7D6EQMygEegUIARCuAQ.. i&docid=x_nY0MQTkndITM&w=1200&h=627&q=chinese%20celestial%20emperor&hl=en&ved=2ahUKEwj9w6bToqPqAhXu1nMBHQG7D6EQMygEegUIARC uAQ
colour whel https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2019/05/Palette3-1.jpg?w=750 https://www.sessions.edu/wp-content/uploads/3_29_2ColorCreate_Caroline-1024x931.png https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2019/05/Palette2-1.jpg?w=750 https://colorpalettes.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/cvetovaya-palitra-63.jpg https://wl-brightside.cf.tsp.li/resize/728x/jpg/b3d/155/ec6cbb56fe8ff1928e90191ce4.jpg
89