"Debacle" is a bit of a misnomer. Well, for me anyway. I'll back up though. Color-Aid is a brand of paint-sample type paper, to be used for art projects. It's kind of like those little colored squares you can get at Home Depot to help you decide on what color to paint your house, except bigger. The standard pack covers pretty much the whole spectrum of hues, but doesn't offer much in the way of less saturated colors. That makes it pretty frustrating to work with, since almost everything in the entire world is a fairly neutral color. But that's not why Color-Aid is so infamous among the entire art program at my school; it's because of the procedure for creating a Color-Aid "painting." You have to draw out the outlines of every single block of color, then trace it onto the back of the Color-Aid, then cut it out with an Exact-o knife or a pair of scissors, then glue it onto the piece of mat board that serves as your "canvas." It takes hours and it's really frustrating.
Except that I loved working with Color-Aid. Granted, not quite enough that I've ever touched the stuff since my color & composition class, but I'm still really proud of the stuff that I made with it. I like the crisp boundaries between blocks of color; something you can't really get any other way--except prints or digital, neither of which I am very proficient with.
The project pictured above was our first: recreate a fauvist painting using Color-Aid. We were specifically to use a fauvist painting because of the use of arbitrary color; the teacher didn't want us using the objects themselves as clues about which color to use. The Fauves used arbitrary color, making the color-matching process a lot more analytical. Mine is based on a painting of the London Bridge by Andre Derain. I'm not going to lie, this one was just as frustrating for me as for everyone else. It took hours and hours and cutting those shapes with an Exacto-knife was frustrating as hell. And like I said, the pack just doesn't have the right color set to match a painting exactly. As a final product I'm really proud of it though, and I put it up top because it seemed like the best representative work for this post.
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I didn't really fall in love with Color-Aid until a few assignments later though. After the Fauvist project we did a bunch of Josef Albers projects just messing with color and optical illusions. Making two different colors look the same, making the same color look like two different ones on different grounds, etc. The next really "artsy" project we did was a sort of abstract still life set. We each brought a few different fruits and vegetables to class, drew simplified templates for them, and then made copies of the templates in various sizes. We played around with the templates until we came up with some interesting intuitive designs, then converted them into Color-Aid images. Here's the result:
The top one is my favorite, personally. Bold colors, interesting composition. I don't know if I love the second one, but mostly just because I'm not big on the color yellow. I did have to use textured paper instead of Color-Aid for the giant mushroom though, just because it's so much bigger than a sheet of Color-Aid, and I think it turned out pretty cool. The last one had a lot of potential in my mind, but the more I look at it the less I like it. So I guess they're in descending order of how much I like them. Anyway they make very nice wall ornaments, and they currently hang as a series going down the stairs into my apartment.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention--we were supposed to use a particular color scheme for each of these as well. The top on is a split complementary color scheme, the next one is a tetrad (the colors I used form a rectangle when plotted on a color wheel), and the bottom one is complimentary. The colors didn't come out exactly right in the scans, but the color schemes still more-or-less fit.
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I don't even remember what the assignment was for this one... Something about pure, abstract design principles. A "formal" design? Something like that. Anyway, I like it so here it is. (The color is actually way off... A combination of poor color correction, I'll admit, and a cheap camera. This whole photo session was a wake-up call about buying a nice camera so that I can document the oil paintings I'm working on now without butchering the quality. The main thing though is the design, which is pretty well intact.)
By the time the final rolled around we had done several different types of projects--including some with various other media. Most people were relieved to be done with Color-Aid forever, but when the teacher announced that we could use whatever medium we wanted I was the only one who was excited to be able to go back to the "home base" for this class. People looked at me like I was crazy. I wanted to do something similar to the fruits & vegetables collage idea, but obviously something new and different. Instead of coming up with a cohesive theme, I just thought, what are some interesting things I like to draw? Well, I like dinosaurs, ships, and musical instruments. Here's what I came up with:
These are, of course, absurd. But if you keep following my blog, sooner or later you'll learn that absurdity is always going to pop up in my artwork. Life is kind of absurd, and the more I try to take it seriously, the more absurd my outlets end up being. People are always looking at these in my apartment (they hang with the three fruit ones as part of the same series) and say things like, "I don't get it." Well, spoiler alert: there's nothing to get. Here or in much of the "modern art" (that's a loaded term but you know what most people mean when they say it--they mean "weird art") people are so intimidated or even offended by. Often, either the absurdity itself is part of the artwork, or the actual pictorial content is irrelevant--it's more about the shapes, the colors, the composition. These pieces play with both aspects of absurdity. But with the possible exception of that first mushroom and strawberry one, they are my favorite of the collages.
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That was it for the class, and that was years ago--winter of 2011, I think. These have all been hanging up in my apartment ever since, but I haven't gotten around to converting them to digital images until recently. While I was doing color correction on the scans, I started playing around with hues. I came up with these bonus images that I'll leave you with--which color schemes are your favorites? These images make me second-guess the color choices I made in the originals:
