For this week’s continued practice in the visual design, I explored color theory and color schemes. I would create my own rendition of Milton Glaser’s famous poster of Bob Dylan by using the silhouette (the outline of an object) of a person I admire and adding opaque, spontaneous color via the abstractified hair.

For the portrait I decided to feature my favorite musician (and probable future queen of Mars) Grimes. She immediately came to mind for this project because I appreciate all of the art that she creates, and her use of color being a large contributor to her talent. Each of these color palettes is based on a look or album cover – all of which fit into certain color schemes.

First is the palette based on the hairstyle I chose to capture for this composition. I was able to extract the colors into an easy-to-use palette by using the Colrd image DNA tool.

This palette is an example of a split-complementary color scheme – a mixture of three colors (and their slight variants) that are made of adjacent colors on the color wheel. While a fully complimentary palette would be more dramatic, this combination is still visually intense.

This next palette was based on her album cover for Halafaxa. All of these colors are part of the cool color scheme, occupying the side of the color wheel that includes blue, green, and violet. Cool color schemes are more calm and serene than their warm counterpart. In this particular composition, that calmness presents as a sort of ethereal-galaxy type vibe – something that matches the music of this album very well.

Finally, I created a rendition using the triadic primary color scheme that is based on her album cover for Art Angels. This is definitely the most vibrant of the batch (again, much like the contents of the album itself). The red, blue, and yellow combo is bold, yet playful and may actually be my favorite.

This exercise was a fun way to practice both Adobe Illustrator and color theory while showing appreciation for an artist that inspires me to go out of my comfort zone to be as creative as possible.

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_{^{Landa, Robin. Graphic Design Solutions. 6th ed., Cengage, 2019.}}