For this Visual Language homework assignment, I was tasked to pick a color palette that represents me, and create six compositions using those colors.

The Color Palette

I wanted a theme with red because this represents it represents love and life, and I believe in living a life doing what you love.
I chose the color palette inspired by Tame Impala ‘Currents’ from The Day’s Color:

These colors are both vibrant and diverse. To me, they represents how I’m always learning different things, and using them in innovative ways to create something exciting.

The Compositions

The technique

These were all made using Adobe Illustrator, with the exception of Cornucopia, which was made with Processing. Adobe Photoshop was used for some pre-processing of images.

For Breadth, I used the Pathfinder Divide tool to have the rotated rectangle cut the pieces it overlaps and to color those pieces a different color.

For Monet - Sunset in Venice I opened an image with the original painting in Photoshop, then set the image mode to indexed color with six colors.

I then opened the six-color image in Illustrator, and used the Pen tool to draw polygons with fills of colors from the palette on top of the image.

For Cornucopia I used processing to recursively draw ellipses that shrank as they drifted off the screen, giving the illusion of a horn.

The code:

int screenHeight = 1024;
int screenWidth =1024;
int margin = 10;

color bg1 = color(9, 9, 22);
color[] colors = { color(213, 68, 68), color(216, 116, 162), color(151, 131, 183) };

int maxDepth = 100;

void setup() {
 size(1024, 1024);
 background(bg1);
}

float firstCircleSize = screenHeight * 0.8;

void draw() { 
  stroke(0, 0);
  float circleHeight = firstCircleSize * 1.1;
  drawCircle(firstCircleSize / 2 + margin, margin + circleHeight / 2, firstCircleSize, circleHeight, 0);
}

void drawCircle(float x, float y, float width, float height, int depth) {
  if (depth >= maxDepth) return;
  fill(colors[depth % colors.length]);
  ellipse(x, y, width, height);

  drawCircle(pow(x, 1.002), pow(y, 1.002), width * 0.95, height * (0.96), depth + 1);    
}

For Solar Flare I drew a shape using the Curvature tool, and like in Breadth used the Pathfinder Divide tool to have it cut the arms of the flare and color the cut pieces.

For Harvey Dan I took a picture of Harvey, my brother’s cat, and put my eyes and glasses on it using Photoshop.

I then exported this into Illustrator and used the Curvature tool to draw shapes over this image.

Now was created quickly in Illustrator using squares.