Colour and Composition
Exercise - 3:
Exploration and Exercises - Noughts and Crosses
Duration:
1 day, Individual Exercise.
Objective:
An exercise combining form, colour, composition and principles of foreground and background, the objective was to understand the behaviour of colours against two starkly different backgrounds, in this case black and white.
Mode:
• Given a xy cm paper, and three geometrical shapes:
a square, a triangle and a circle.
• Compose a ‘colour arrangement’ using these three shapes, where the colour assigned to each shape remains the same, but its position differs (remember playing noughts and crosses?).
• The colours to be used are red, blue and yellow.
• Apply stroke and fill separately, against two different backgrounds – white and black.
• Choose which background to apply in either case.
• The size of the circle and triangle, are to be dictated by the square, whose sides measure 20cm.
Materials:
Brushes, paints (Poster red, Prussian blue, Lemon yellow), coloured paper, A-1 size black/ white sheets.
Discussion in the Class:
Trichromacy Theory, Lightness/Brightness, Contrast, Background.
Observations:
Though the overall perceptions varied from student to student, the role of yellow being very crucial was admitted by all, as the behaviour of yellow varies drastically against black and white.
Though the student was asked to carry out the exercise in an abstract manner, keeping in mind only the visual qualities like weight, shape, colour volume etc. in mind, for ease of articulation the students tried to relate the composition to an object or familiar forms/objects.
Going forward the same exercise can be done a little differently, as in, the student may be exposed to all the options possible (the work done by students this year could be used for this purpose) and then asked to analyze these alternatives using the parameters of brilliance, foreground, background etc. and then come up with an option that they feel works the best.
