Effect of Color (Still in the making…)
For the final project I wanted to incorporate what I love to do most which was digital painting. I did a little bit of it in my previous Scratch project so I wanted to take it a step further in this one. In terms of subject matter, I knew I wanted to do portraiture. After speaking to Dr. Kantrowitz I knew I didn’t want to overthink this project, so I needed to pick something I could do in the amount of time that we had while still being meaningful.
I started by taking a photo of Anna from our class for reference and then painting her on the digital canvas. I thought her outfit was perfect considering she had many different pieces of clothing on. These would prove very helpful and fun to play with in Scratch later. I kept the image in grey scale so I could focus on values because I wanted to incorporate color and it’s effect into the project later.
After completing the sketch layout of the portrait, I dissected it into different components so that they could be selected individually in Scratch. The point of that was because I wanted to be able to manipulate the color of each element to see what mood it would create. The image itself is grey but the color selected greatly impacts the feeling the viewer gets from it.
In Scratch you can add coding that changes the color of the sprite clicked ever so slightly. So I took the dissected pieces and uploaded them as different sprites to allow for the effect to work.
In the end after playing with it a few times, an end result can look like this:
You can begin to see how color choice is an important element in the overall mood of the piece. This is what is the core of my lesson plan because when color is taught it can be in a very academic way. The use of color is a very important fundamental to understand as artist however it is a very expressive element meaning that it can always be experimented with to discover new possibilities. This lesson plan will be a great way to open new ways to explore color as students develop during their artistic careers in high school and beyond.
There is no question that you are an amazing digital artist, i can see that is a passion of yours and I think it was a wonderful idea to bring this into a lesson plan. The idea of using this as a lesson about color and what color does to a painting is a great idea as well as a wonderful way to introduce scratch to students.
I love your concept for this project! It’s really great that you are building this project off of something you are confident in, I feel like having that out of the way you are able to build further on the lesson. Color is a hard thing to build a successful and meaningful lesson around on its own, so I really appreciate how your lesson plan manages to do that, especially in a way so critical to digital artist (testing out different color schemes to find the most successful)!
Patrick, you’re literally such an amazing artist!! Even though this project is simple, it’s super effective. Color and color theory is such an important topic to learn in the arts. As much as I hated my color foundation class my freshman year, it really did make me open up my eyes and view colors so differently. Learning the importance of color, complements, and how it brings things to life is honestly kind of underrated, and I’m glad you’re giving it attention 🙂 I also love how you have it in scratch, I think making it interactive makes it all the more fun!!
you are so talented I cant stress enough how much I love everything you make and am so blown away by your abilities and I’m high-key obsessed with this digital portrait (definitely not biased at all) I think this lesson plan is important because its a really god way for students to learn about color and animation in a non-overwhelming way. It is simple and strong and can go very far for students learning and understanding. great job!