Equal Values

This was my first color theory project. The assignment was to first come up with a theme that we would use for the entire quarter. I chose pianos. So every project I do this term has to be some different representation of the piano. This was very abstract. So with the theme we had to do two identical compositions that matched each other's value scale. Value is the lightness or darkness of something. For example, the background of this site has the lowest value, Black. The type is a higher value than the background (its actually the highest value: White). We explored this with the roman head remember? So each color has a natural value too. Yellow is very high in value, red is very low. If you turned a color picture to a black and white, this would be very apparent. Thats basically what we did for this project, but we had to eyeball it. It was an eye-training exercise. We had to mix paint and color and cut out pieces to match values from the monochromatic (blue) comp, to the achromatic (BW) comp. We also had to include 7 different values. You do a lot of squinting. The final result is pretty vague (as far as my piano theme goes) but if you stand way back it actually starts to look like a keyboard. Oh yeah, and the different values were acheived by mixing Blue with black and/or white for the monochromatic, and only Black and White for the achromatic.