syllabus — ART 205 — Color Theory

Written Color Study:

Analysis of Color Use in Past Work

overview:

Our class goal is to use color more deliberately for greater effectiveness and stronger work. To increase our successful use of color, we need to examine our prior work to determine where color is working well, where color is not effective or under-utilized, and how we can leverage color in future works. This assignment will take the form of an analysis paper of your own creative work (creative work in your media and genre) and a small sampling of images of your work.

process:

1) Choose three or more of your own works to analyze. The works you choose should not be from this course, but ideally they should be works that you feel are relatively successful to successful. Since color includes hue, saturation/chroma (tones), and value (tints/shades), even monochrome work can be analyzed in terms of color.

2) Photograph or otherwise document at least three of the works you analyzed so you can submit the works on D2L as separate files or as decently sized images pasted into the analysis paper.

3) Analyze the works in terms of some of the following attributes to get a sense for the color use in individual works or generally in your body of work:
- positive or effective use of color (describe why positive)
- neutral or under-utilized use of color (describe why)
- negative or poor use of color (describe why)
- recollection of your initial thoughts about color when constructing the work
- the relationships between the media of the work and the colors used
- color scheme(s) or color relationships, especially trends in your work
- conceptual use of color or symbolic use of color
- how could color use be stronger in each sample
- how could color be leveraged as a stronger element in future work (consider aesthetic and conceptual uses of color)

OPTIONAL: if you choose you may also include up to 3 works by another artist (or artists) who you admire to compare and contrast their color use with your own. Please include the artist’s name and an image of the work in the submissions if you choose this optional component; do not choose any work where you cannot find the artist’s name.

4) Write about what you’ve discovered about your own work and hypothesize about what you can do to improve your use of color moving forward.

paper specifications:

• See analysis details above.
• Papers should follow the principles of composition, grammar, and spelling.
• Please use standard typefaces, point sizes, and margins.
• Paper length should be at least 500 words, and may include lists or charts as needed for the analysis of the work.

submission specifications:

• Submit your paper on D2L as a Microsoft Word or PDF file.
• Submit images of the works you’ve selected to accompany the writing. These images may be embedded in the paper at reasonable size for viewing (but will not count towards the length of the paper) or may be submitted separately on D2L as JPG or HEIC or PDF files. These are for my reference and should be reasonable quality, but do not need to be edited or print quality. Cell phone photos of work, screen captures, and native digital files are all appropriate. Please note that you should look at the original work when writing since any color shift in a low-quality image will skew your analysis.
• All items must be on D2L by class time on the due date.

tips + resources:

• DePaul’s Writing Center and other DePaul Resources for Writers