This site is an experiment. It’s my attempt to document the wide array of personal interests, curiosities, and self-directed learning efforts which continually seem to occupy my off-hours.
My interests tend to vary – I tend to hop around a lot conceptually, in terms of what motivates or excites me.
I go through phases; minor obsessions with very different topics or areas of interest. Like the avante-garde pop of Devo, or the social commentary of Popeye and Groucho Marx, or the design philosophies of the Bauhaus, or Einstein’s Relativity. I have always tended to hop laterally from subject to subject, and then try to integrate and assimilate that new information into what I already know.
I’m mostly a visual learner. I need to see and make images to help me understand. So, aside from the chronological, bloggy aspect of this site, I thought that it would good to have an image portfolio to show any research that I do, or to show illustrations that helped me to get to where I wanted to go.
Somewhere there are connections – common threads – between all these various areas of interest. Finding those threads and tugging on them is part of the joy of discovery.
I am a life-long learner, and probably, a perpetual student.
Unit 2: Colour Energy
Continuing with my self-directed study of colour by following the telecourse Colour: An Introduction.
(Check out all my colour assignments here.)
These notes give more detail on my experiences while completing this unit of study:
Click image to view the gallery for this unit:
The goals for this unit of study were:
- to explore the impact of various contrasts:
- contrast of extension, warm/cool, tonal, theoretical relationships of colour to shape
My experiences while completing the assignments:
- Again, the lack of control in drawing on the Playbook tablet forced me to complete some drawing aspects (the round-cornered squares and triangles of the secondary colour-forms) on my PC, using Photoshop.
- For colour selection, a few different tablet paint programs were employed, according to the abilities of the colour picker in each versus the requirements of the assignment: one program’s colour picker made it easier to find less saturated colours, while another allowed me to more easily select a warm or cool variation of a colour.
Unit 1: Basics of Colour
I thought I’d dive into a self-directed study of colour by following the 1980s telecourse Colour: An Introduction. It’s always good to re-tune your instrument once in a while.
(Check out all my colour assignments here.)
Even though I’ve worked as a designer for over 20 years, and have had a good sense of colour for as long as I can remember (at least in my opinion), this telecourse has challenged me and refreshed my thinking on effective colour use, theories, visual perception, and visual literacy in design.
These notes give more detail on my experiences while completing this unit of study:
Click image to view the gallery for this unit:
The goals for this unit of study were:
- to establishing primary and secondary colours
- to define colour wheel model
- to explore light/dark (tonal) properties of the primary and secondary colours
- to explore warm/cool (temperature) properties of the primary and secondary colours
My experiences while completing the assignments:
- I’ve completed most of the assignments on my Blackberry Playbook. I thought it might be a convenient and capable tool for colour exploration and basic mark-making. It’s a convenient tool for some things, but not ideal for everything.
- In essence, I have much less drawing control than I’d like. With the generic stylus I’ve been using, painting little freehand lines and figures or little blobs of paint is quite easy, but drawing clean geometric shapes is cumbersome, because the stylus isn’t that accurate and the paint programs that I chose (free ones) leave much to be desired in terms of drawing tools. Some drawings, like the colour circle, had to be completed in Photoshop.
- Check your tablet’s brightness setting before you begin, or all your colours may be too light or too dark.
Explorations in learning, ideas, and design by E. John Love