famous blue raincoat

ok, so i definitely didn't mean to be absent for so long.  i got bogged down in school work (yuck!) and in family things and unfortunately, those are just two areas that I can't ignore in order to blog.  i still have more photos from the landscape project that i want to write about, but i will save them for this weekend.  and i haven't found a deal worth mentioning for "Thrifty Thursday" yet since i have been doing school work and not shopping!  

today i thought i would just do a quick post and show you something designed for my 2D Animation and Color Theory class last semester.  it was definitely one of my most favorite classes because there weren't many constraints on the designing.  it was pretty much anything goes as long as you followed the rules in terms of elements and principles of design and choosing color palettes.  for one of our projects we had to base our designs on certain descriptive words like "sad", "blissful", and "shy".  the instructor gave us several options and we had to choose 10.  then we had to use Kuler, which is Adobe's awesome color program, and find color combinations that went with those words, but you also had to stick to color schemes like complimentary, analogous, triadic, etc.  i will say more about Kuler in a bit...

the design i was most proud of was my design for "sad" which was inspired my one of my most favorite songs of all time, "Famous Blue Raincoat" by Leonard Cohen.  i love this design because i actually drew something with the brush tool in Illustrator.  mostly, because i am not an illustrator, i just use geometric shapes or lines to create my pieces.  but for this i actually drew the raincoat and raindrops and used some effects and textures to enhance the drawing.  this is probably nothing for artists who are very good or even just okay at drawing, but since i am terrible at drawing, i was really proud of the way this turned out.

this was my piece for "shy".  again here, i drew the flowers using the brush tool.  the awful thing is that I don't remember what color schemes either of these pieces used!  the raincoat may have been monochromatic with the addition of a gray background and this flower illustration could be something like a split complimentary or a triadic.  

Kuler is a free color choosing website from Adobe where you can create your own color combinations based on color properties like analogous, monochromatic, etc, or upload a photo and it will pick out color values from that photo.  it's all customizable and if you create an account (it's free) you can download different schemes and import them into Photoshop and Illustrator to use in your designs.  you can check out my Kuler page here.

this last design i will show you was based on the word "blissful" and i believe that scheme is analogous.  i think my instructor liked this piece the best out of all 10 of my designs.

thanks for being patient with me as i work my blog posts around the rest of my schedule.  i'll try to do better by you and post more frequently!  have a great wednesday!