Scroll Stopper: Trisha Adams' "Made You Smile"
Color is absolutely the star of the show in Trisha Adam's "Made You Smile." But it's her use of dominance and contrast that offer some great ready-to-use tangible lessons for our own work.
Dominance:
Dominance is when one of something is more than the other. A great example of this is Adams’ use of warm and cool. Warm is the dominant color temperature. There are more warms in this painting than cools. The red flowers, the orange background. (That table is right on the line but leans yellow/yellow green.)
The dominance of warm is important because it is one of the reasons those blues sparkle. Those same blues set in a sea of cools, wouldn’t jump off the page in the same way.
Contrast:
Contrast can be low or high and they have different purposes. High contrast areas keep your eye moving through apainting. Low contrast areas create interesting areas of calm. Adams uses both.
For great examples of low contrast areas, look at Adams’ color variation in both her foregrounds and backgrounds. She’s not painting these areas like a flat roll of house paint. She’s created wonderful variations of color and just a bit of value (in the foreground especially.) These subtle contrasts (i.e. low contrasts) create areas that are interesting but still restful.
There are also areas of high contrast that help move your eye around. Those pops of blue could have trapped our attention and never let it go. However, by creating additional high areas of contrast around the piece like the value contrast of the fruit shadows and the shape and line contrast of the stripes, Adams moves our eye expertly around her piece.
Put it to practice:
If you’re just getting started with design, practice choosing a color dominance. Write it on a sticky note so you remember. Pull out a color wheel and keep it in view so you remember. There will be places where you’ll be able to choose warm or cool and if you have a dominance decided, that will help inform your answers.
If you’re not sure what your dominant temperature is, ask yourself what you want to be the star of the show… and then make the dominant hue the other. For example, if you want your star to be red, then make the temperature dominance in your painting cool. And vice versa.
Also, look for areas where you can create interest through low contrast choices. Backgrounds and foregrounds are great places to look for these kinds of opportunities.
Thank you to Trisha Adams for permission to use her image. Prints of “Made You Smile” are available soon at her website.
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