What is Art Without Colour?

In as much as a crayon box is a cacophony of different hues and colours, and so is every square meter in this world.  And the world of Interior Design is no different from a crayon box.  We work and play with colours all the time, making it an indispensible element of ID.  The dance between and among two or more colours has helped the world become a more pleasant place to live in.

In exploring the field of Interior Design, you will work with colour rendering and painting.  The market today offers an array of different artist’s tools like pastels, oil pastels, gouache, coloured pencils, water colours, acrylics, oil paint, and many more.

Water colour are stains suspended in water-soluble palette.  It gives the artist the freedom to mix the actual colours with one another in a palette.  However, thin washes of paint also mix optically when overlaid one over the other.  The image below is my water colour project which highlights where the shadowing can be found with respect to the light.)

The quality of coloured pencils make it almost impossible to physically mix or blend different colours together.  Therefore, to be able to produce a unique tint, we apply coloured pencils directly on the canvas and carefully layer the colours on top of each other.  It is essential to note that a third colour is dependent on the proximity of one colour to another.

 
Here are two basic examples of perspectives which I have hand rendered.

The pictures below were projects from class for a faculty room, living room, and kitchen space planning.  These perspectives include material choices, colour, and lighting schemes.

Colour rendering allows potential clients to visualize and appreciate your desired finished product.  It is a good way to concretize your ideas and to visually impart your concept.

Oil paints are usually mixed together on a palette using a brush.  The resulting mixture is then applied to the support.  These mixtures can be applied either thickly or thinly as a glaze, depending on the desired outcome.  A famous technique that artists practice is using blobs of colours applied next to each other without mixing them.  This allows for the oil paint to mix optically.  Other artists may opt to mix and apply oil paint with a knife.

These landscapes and still life oil paintings are inspired by simple objects.  On a stretched canvas, I painted a couple of coloured wine bottles next to a fruit with green, red, yellow, blue, pink, orange, and brown accents.  I did a rough sketch of the subject using a pencil and thinned paint before proceeding to the actual oil painting process.  I mixed the paint with linseed oil for proper drying. Starting from the background, I liberally played with different colours to be able to produce just the right shade.  As I have previously done before, I initially focused on the areas which were lighter than the others and slowly built my way around it, carefully examining what needs more depth in colour or what needs to be further modified.

Acrylic paints are very much like oil paint.  Acrylics are mixed using a brush or a knife.  Also, similar to the oil paint, the acrylic paint can be mixed both physically or optically.  Because of its unique quality of having quick drying time, the acrylic paint is ideal for glazing.

The photo above shows a personalized gift I gave my mother as a Mother’s Day gift a few years ago.  I hand painted beautiful flowers on a wooden tray.  I base coated the top and used acrylic paint as my medium.  I combined two different colours for the pansy flowers.  For the shell-shaped petals, I used a flat brush.  I did overlapped strokes of about 5 layers and paired it with individual teardrop-shaped petals at the bottom of the pansy.

No matter what medium an artist chooses, one should remember to simply be creative, imaginative, and let one’s colourful imagination be the genesis of something beautiful.