Walking Through the Color Process

In today's blog, I am going to give you all a behind-the-scenes walk-through of my design and thought process for the art piece I posted last night on Seeing__Colors called "Guiding me through the dark." It was very fun to create but also quite nerve-racking.

At the beginning of this week, I decided to look over my profile and see what new things I could try. After looking at all my posts, I found that I didn't venture too much into pieces involving moody light sources. What I mean by this is images involving light that is bouncing and projecting onto multiple facets of the image. This is sometimes quite difficult because it requires a good understanding of how light works both within photography and the real world itself. So to even further expand my range of skills I decided to start growing this weakness of mine into a strength. The first step in this goal was to make that first post.

When thinking about what to create, I got really interested in objects or scenes that reduce the light to a very strict source. The different options I looked into were a small window, goggles, and vehicle headlights. After some playing around with each idea, I finally settled on vehicle headlights as the focus of my piece. The next step in my design process began with a search for the right color palette to use. As you all know by now, pinks and purples are my favorites colors to work with so I had to go with a gradient of the two! However, with a very fundamental understanding of how to create convincing light sources, I spent some time on YouTube to watch some tutorials so I could make my artwork of the highest quality I could. Of the videos I watched, I really enjoyed this one by PHLEARN which explained how to create beams of light from absolutely nothing!

So with finding a topic, color palette, and tutorial video taken care of, I began the process of actually creating the artwork. For this particular piece, I was hung up on two different ways I could take it. The first idea was to create some kind of glowing liquid falling out of the headlights and onto the street below. The second was to have bright beams of light shooting out of the headlights. I sided with the latter because it matched better with the structure of the image. What I mean by this is that a car is man-made, thus being more geometrical and structured like straight beams coming out of the headlights. After deciding on this aspect, I spent some time toying with different reflections using my brush and gradient tools. I then finished up by using the camera raw filter in Photoshop to boost the vibrancy of the lights, darken the shadows, and add a faint, purple hue to the piece.

Overall, I could definitely improve on some parts of the image. However, this was only my first real attempt of this effect, so I can only improve from here!

Let me know down below if you want to hear more about my design process for my pieces and if you want to see video tutorials in the future!

- Jared