✏️ Colour and Abstraction
Using colour to communicate design thinking
‘But all colour is a fugitive thing, isn’t it, even colour in real life? It’s always changing.’ - David Hockney (Spring Cannot Be Cancelled)
✏️ The Sketch
Step 1. Pick the image of a space or the view of a landscape. You could just walk down your street and take a picture of it.
Step 2. Pick three colours from the scene. This step will be easier to do with a digital tool such as Photoshop or Procreate, but I would recommend trusting your eye instead of the camera.
Choose your colours wisely!
Perhaps you want to pick up the colours of the light, or perhaps you want to reflect the materiality of the scene. Whether these 3 colours are complementary or they have the same hue is up to you depending on what you’d like to communicate visually from that scene.
Step 3. Paint the scene using only the 3 colours you picked. Remember, it’s a quick sketch! (we can also call it a sketch even when we are painting). The result will be an abstraction of the view, but you will still be able to convey key information about it depending on the colours you chose to represent the scene.
💡 Some Ideas
Colour is a powerful tool for abstracting and communicating visual ideas in our drawings.
These are some ways in which we can use colour as a sketch tool to communicate design thinking:
Colour adds an extra level of information that the monochrome sketch lacks: materiality, light, and time. You can appreciate the colour of the sunset in Kanh’s drawings of the Pyramids.
Peter Zumthor’s legendary sketch is another example of an architect painting the light in their designs.
Colour can draw attention to a particular detail. Recently, I came across this magnificent Kandinsky1 in The Thyssen Museum in Madrid: the yellow in the painting focuses our attention on the centre of the event, - and on the people.
As an architect, for example, Peter Barber uses green in his drawings to frame his housing designs and to convey the life these bring to the community. He also tends to use the same colour palette (a couple of greens, a blue and a yellow) in the majority of his sketches.
Colour does not need to be accurate or true to reality2: it can help to layer elements in the composition or it can also be used to communicate an emotion. This fantastic drawing from the great Lina Bo Bardi exemplifies this. Or this other Kandinsky.
Try using colour next time in your sketches to communicate your design ideas. You’ll see they come to life!
Cheers and happy sketching! 💫✏️
Ana
This is one of Kandinsky’s pictures before his constructivism period, up to the early 1910s, which I personally find super interesting (landscapes and the use of colour).
Indeed, the perception of reality is entirely subjective. Each of us not only will see different shades of colour in a landscape, but will also appreciate and notice specific colours on that very same landscape. For some of us, that landscape will be bright green, for some others, it will be as yellow as the sunset, or it will be as blue as the shadows in a cold winter afternoon.