Category Archives: research

Rebuilding Foundations: 2012 Colour Studies – Unit 5

Unit 5: Discord Energy

Continuing with my self-directed study of colour by following the telecourse Colour: An Introduction.

(Check out all my colour assignments here.)

Here are my notes from completing this unit of study:

Click image to view the gallery for this unit:
Colour Studies 2012, Unit 5

The goals for this unit of study were:

  • mixing alternating, classical and complementary discords

My experiences while completing the assignments:

  • I enjoyed the ideas of discords, and the approaches to them as described by Hudson and Johannes Itten. I found colour and tonal combinations which, for me, evoked particular periods and styles in art, design and fashion. When I see a dark orange against a light red (pink), or light blue next to a dark green, it always makes me think of fashion and illustration from the 40s or 50s.
  • I did this unit exclusively on my Playbook tablet. Even though the colour exercises demonstrate mixing red, yellow, and blue primaries in pigment, I was actually dealing in RGB colour.
  • An enjoyable unit, but I need to produce more work here – it seems too incomplete. It would be a good idea to go back and review the unit examples, video and assignment instructions and see what I may have overlooked.

On Synthesis: Connecting the dots from basic design through multimedia

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been studying the history of British Basic Design movement, and especially, the Bauhaus.It has made me see my own path in art and design in a new way.

Revisiting what I see as the most elemental teachings in colour, visual language, and design has invigorated my curiosity, but it also caused me a lot of confusion. The reason for my confusion was that I was having trouble connecting what I was reading about various artists, methods and art/design approaches from different eras with my own values and personal experiences. Admittedly, my readings and reflections have been a bit unfocused, but share common themes.

Here is a progression of the subjects I’ve studied recently (in some order):

Subject / Source What I Took Away From it
Foundation-level colour studies.
Sources: “Colour: An Introduction” (Hudson/OLA, 1987), “Eye and Brain” (Gregory, ), “Elements of Colour” (Itten, 1970).
Refreshed my knowledge of mixing, contrasts, perception, additive vs. subtractive theories, and in developing personal visual language. Some of Tom Hudson’s colour exercises overlap into explorations of 2D visual language (point, line, shape, texture, etc.) similar to Kandinsky. Ongoing goal is to complete 8 units of study.
Foundation-level colour theory.
Sources: “Elements of Colour” (Johannes Itten, 1970), online resources.
Led me from colour to shape (Itten’s primary and secondary colour-forms) and online and offline reviews of Bauhaus history. Renewed my interest in structure of Bauhaus Basic Design program in the 1920s, and the later UK Basic Design curriculum developments in the 1950s and 1960s. Also researched master colourists Josef Albers and Hans Hoffman, and revisited colour theory models by Chevreul and Munsell, and modern “colour solids” like the RGB colour cube.
Foundation-level visual language.
Sources: “Mark and Image (Hudson/OLA, 1989), “Point and Line to Plane” (Kandinsky, 1926).
Kandinsky’s inspired descriptions of his personal philosophy of visual language. Many of my earliest teachings with Tom Hudson echoed Kandinsky’s ideas.
The Bauhaus, its Teachers and Impact.
Sources: “Bauhaus” (Editors: Jeanine Fidler, Peter Feierabend, 1999), “Kandinsky” (Taschen, 2000), plus online resources.
The social and political landscape of Europe in the 1920s and ’30s, and the differences in philosophy between the Bauhaus’s Directors and major teachers (e.g. Itten, Gropius, Moholy-Nage).
UK Basic Design developments in the 1950s and 1960s.
Sources: Articles and collections, online and offline.
Renewed investigation of my past teacher, Tom Hudson and his role and working relationship with Victor Pasmore, Richard Hamilton and Harry Thurbron. UK Basic Design seemed to adapt Bauhaus approaches, yet applied them to the current cultural context. I pondered this a lot, trying to project it forward to the present day, onto online and digital media, instead of industrial tech of the 60s.
Influences of Basic Design and Modernism on Foundation and Visual Design programs.
Sources: Google searches.
Ongoing ad-hoc study. Most US approaches to “visual literacy” that I’ve seen seem to focus on developing skills in discernment, decoding and judgement (analogous to “reading comprehension”?). Richard Wilde at School of Visual Art (New York) leads courses in visual literacy for his design students. I’m curious to see to what degree developing vis-lit via creation (i.e. “writing”) skills are taught in higher ed, and in high-school art/design instruction.
Current issues in computer-based graphic design, multimedia and web design.
Sources: Google searches.
Ongoing. An online review of graphic design curricula from various institutions will help me understand transformation of issues and themes in previous “modernist” design education, through to today’s highly computer-driven tools and processes. Also curious about how much digital tech (e.g. desktop and tablet computers) is being used in art/design instruction instead of traditional tools in high school and higher ed.

For me, new knowledge  – new information – will only transform my ideas and help me grow if I can use it in some direct way. It must be practical in some sense.

 

Related Posts:

 

Rebuilding Foundations: 2012 Colour Studies – Unit 4

Unit 4: Between Black and White

Continuing with my self-directed study of colour by following the telecourse Colour: An Introduction.

(Check out all my colour assignments here.)

Here are my notes from completing this unit of study:

Click image to view the gallery for this unit:
Colour Studies 2012, Unit 4

The goals for this particularly large unit of study were:

  • mixing chromatic blacks, greys, and whites
  • establishing a grey scale
  • “breaking” a colour, by adding it complementary

My experiences while completing the assignments:

  • Like the other units, I did this unit exclusively on my Playbook tablet. Even though the Colour course exercises demonstrate mixing the red, yellow, and blue subtractive primaries (e.g. oil pigments), I was actually dealing in RGB colour (additive, light).
  • Using a paint program with a basic colour picker that had three sliders (one for Red, one for Green, and one for Blue), picking colours that successively changed from one primary to its complement were a challenge. Going from a saturated colour to a grey was much simpler.
  • A very enjoyable unit, but I think I need to produce more work here – it seems too incomplete in terms of explorations.

Rebuilding Foundations: 2012 Colour Studies – Unit 3

Unit 3: Colour Structures

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:
Colour Studies 2012, Unit 3

The goals for this particularly large unit of study were:

  • further exploration of to colour temperature (warm/cool) aspects
  • to further explore the relationship of colour to form, via personal language and basic mark-making using warm and cool colour combinations
  • using triads and tetrads on the colour wheel to establish colour schemes
  • To use those colour schemes to devise freeform and geometric shapes and lines (layouts)

My experiences while completing the assignments:

  • Again, some drawing aspects (straight-edged forms in the colour layout series) had to be finished on my PC using Photoshop.

Rebuilding Foundations: Colour Studies, Redux

Unit 1: Colour Wheel - Subtractive Primaries and Secondaries
Unit 1: Colour Wheel - Subtractive Primaries and Secondaries

Recently, I’ve been walking myself through a telecourse called “Colour – An Introduction”. This course intends to help anyone effectively use and appreciate colour in many different capacities. It was designed to be for a general audience, with no specific art or design training or prerequisite experience.

Originally co-produced by BC’s Knowledge Network and The Open Learning Agency around 1987, this award-winning telecourse was comprised of nine video programs and a printed course manual. It was first aired on BC’s Knowledge Network and for years was broadcast and offered as a Foundation-level colour course to students across Canada and internationally.

In the mid-2000s, after the OLA’s catalog was taken over by Thompson Rivers University, Colour and its companion Foundation telecourses continued to be offered offline via DVD.

Foundations of Colour

As a student at Emily Carr College in the 80s, I studied under (and later worked for) Master Art Educator Dr. Tom Hudson. At that time, Tom and ECCAD’s Outreach department had made it their mission to make ECCAD’s first year Foundation curriculum available to the general public through distance learning. Colour was the first of four series that Tom wrote and hosted.

Although I’d never formally taken Tom’s Colour telecourse, I was able to get a spare draft copy of its manual, and I religiously taped the video episodes off of TV. Although I’d already taken Foundation Colour classes, the theory and perception of colour continued to fascinate me. I read and bought books on colour and perception, and learned a great deal by studying under Tom’s expert personal guidance. To me, Tom’s manual for “Colour: An Introduction” was a must-have item for my growing library, and an indispensable artifact of Tom’s studio-based teaching methodology.

Computer as Tools for Learning About Colour

I was one of two second year fine arts students selected by Tom to be his “computer students”. Where Tom’s other students used charcoal, ink, graphite or paint to explore visual language in his summer master classes, we worked almost exclusively on Amiga personal computers.

Back in the 1980s, desktop computer technology was still relatively in its infancy, with different platforms offering different capabilities of colour range and spatial resolution. My earliest explorations in computer-based visual literacy research were using a Commodore 64 running Koala Painter and a KoalaPad drawing tablet and stylus. Months later, Emily Carr College acquired dozens of Amiga personal computers, and I continued using the Amiga platform for visual literacy research and animation development over the next four years.

This Round of Research

In my new series of personal research in colour, I’m using a Blackberry Playbook tablet and sometimes, Adobe Photoshop on a Windows PC.

I guess the moral of this story is:

Once a computer-based visual literacy student, always a computer-based visual literacy student. 🙂

On Design: Visual Literacy in Interface Design

During my art education at Emily Carr College in the 80s, I took a unique opportunity to study visual literacy under the college’s Dean of Education, Tom Hudson. This research and study involved developing computer-based imagery research for Tom’s telecourse, “Mark and Image”.

In practical terms, it was like having a world-class personal tutor. We started off simply, using the limited personal computer resources available at the time. I remember using Koala Painter (with the KoalaPad and stylus) on a Commodore 64. I divided my screen into quadrants; the first of many “worksheets” which Tom had all his traditional-media drawing students do as well. Inside one of the quadrants, Tom instructed me to draw points and to arrange them spatially. “Feel the space between the points. Feel the space,” Tom’s voice told me. I smirked self-consciously, feeling too much like Luke Skywalker to Tom’s Obi-Wan Kenobi. But I was learning to watch and to listen. Tom’s guidance resonated with me and I kept at it, slowly beginning to learn about the space, pace, rhythm and texture of points, lines and shapes. We started in black and white, and moved into colour when we started looking at “primary” shapes and basic geometry.

I did dozens of screens like this on the C-64, and later, scores and scores more on the Amiga, where the spatial resolution and colour palette were significantly improved. However, it was still a pixely, chunky drawing medium, compared with paper, ink and charcoal. We learned that any deficiencies in resolution were quickly compensated for by the advantages of digital memory. “Cut and paste” and numerous other near-instant transformational capabilities provided by our little paint program provided us with almost unlimited possibilities for variations and explorations.

As for the drawing exercises themselves, it was a bit like learning a new kind of basic grammar, like learning musical notes, chords, and scales. I was actually learning a new vocabulary of visual elements; perceptual dynamics that underlie every man-made visual image. I learned later that the approach Tom took with his computer-based drawing students was based in the Bauhaus Basic Course, in principles taught by Wassily Kandinsky, and in aspects of visual perception documented by Rudolph Arnheim.

These were the same principles that Tom and his colleagues had infused into the British Art Education system back in the 1950s. So, I watched, I drew, and I studied, feeling part of a very fascinating modernist educational tradition.

Now, as I contemplate how my career has progressed and I continue to refine my skills in interface design, I must admit that those early teachings with Tom still have so much to offer me. His voice is still in my ear, and I need to keep listening…

See: “Visual Literacy in Software Design” (paper).