Use of colour in imagery

Up to now I have researched 4 different artists. Shirley Baker a photographer in the 60s, Nick Broomfield a documentary film maker, Peter Saville and Neville Brody who are graphic designers. Continuing with the theme of colours and mood boards I was tasked with taking one image from 3 of these artists and explore the uses of colour to interpret what they were trying to say.

I did this by firstly printing off the pictures I chose and annotated them. Then on the other page I used different techniques to express those colours myself to further get a feel for them in a way I thought personally the artist would represent them.

Shirley Baker

Shirley's work is mostly in black and white as they are shot in the 1960's, but this one here was shot in Hulme 1965 is in colour and it's the perfect example I was searching for. The image still feels like a b&w image due to the washed out white and grey pigments but the bold wine red and baby blue colours stand out incredibly, contrasting against the generic grey.

I have demonstrated this on the other page by sketching out different parts of the image such as the bricks, the young girl and the door set itself. While also using crayons, pencils and magazine cropping to collage it all together in a mass collection of colours that portray the image. That's a running theme during this project, I kind of blobbed all the colours together when testing them.

The feeling I got from this image was childhood innocence. I almost felt like the image was one of those colour pop images that are popular now (everything is black & white besides the subject) because everything is washed out besides the child's pink shoes and the pram. Considering how everything was run down and deprived during the slum clearance of the area during that time its a comforting image to see children playing happily during such a time.

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Nick Broomfield

Nick produced the Kurt & Courtney documentary in 1998 following Kurt's death in 1994. Kurt Cobain lived a sad life and that is perfectly portrayed in this image. It is very dark and brooding and the only colours are still very pale and washed out. One thing that really stands out to me is that Kurt's eyes are still very blue. Despite the bleached yellow ting of his face and sad expression there his bright blue eyes still remain. The eyes tell you the story better than anything else on an expression, and you can see the sadness yet beauty in them.

Another thing I like and its a really simple one to miss is the colours of "KURT" and "COURTNEY". Especially during the time of this documentary being released the normality is that blue is associated with boys and pink is girly. Yet the colours are flipped, to me this perfectly sums up Kurt and his attitude of not paying attention to the norm.

When recreating the colours I used crayons and water colour paints mostly. I wanted to try to express the dark broodiness myself and add bright splashes throughout it. I also made up an emoji-esc picture as the centre point as that would be the equivalent today.

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Peter Saville

The last piece I found was an image called "Game Over" I found by Peter Saville. I wanted to try something completely new to me when expressing the colours for this. In the annotation I mentioned that It feels like a water colour image, and it does but looking into it further it actually felt like an oil painting.

I got out my oil paints that I've never tried before and started blobbing and stroking different colours into the page. Feeling it was a bit to dull I added a bit of water colour and crayon as well. Another thing that really stands out is the white font on top of the image so to interpret this I cut out blank paper strips and stuck them on top.

Because this is a thermal image I felt like the colours portrayed the hot rush of motion of the car due to the car being blurred as well on the edges.

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Bibliography

UNKNOWN. 2017 “Shirley Baker: Women and Children; and Loitering Men” by Shirley Baker. http://manchesterartgallery.org/exhibitions-and-events/exhibition/shirley-baker/. [07/10/2018 23:14]

UNKNOWN. “Kurt & Courtney” by Nick Broomfield. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_%26_Courtney. [07/10/2018 23:12]

GILBERT. S. 2013 “The creative genius of Peter Saville – in pictures” by Peter Saville. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2013/sep/09/creative-genius-peter-saville-in-pictures#img-1. [07/10/2018 23:09]