Beginner's - ArtTrader Magazine

Art TRADER
m a g a z i n e
To Draw Attention Away
You can actually use color to draw attention away from something in your art (such as a mistake!) Use a
neutral color for the area you wish to draw attention from, and use brighter, more intense color (this is called
saturation) in an area away from the neutral colors. Let’s look at the Peace postcard once more: You will
see that the hands are a neutral color. Skin color can be any color; red, yellow, black, brown etc. But the
hands for this image were specifically colored a neutral tan/gray so as not to compete with the round Earth!
Because a neutral color can so easily fade into the background, the hands are outlined in fuchsia, so as to
remain visible to the eye. Fuchsia was carefully chosen, though, so it would remain cohesive with the rest
of the purple/blue elements in the design.
To Draw Attention To
The same principle applies here. If you wish to draw attention to a face, or to text, use color to draw the
eye.
This postcard has a really difficult composition: The text and collaged hand are almost competing with the
cupcake because they take up about the same amount of space in the postcard. However, you can use
color to save an iffy composition such as this. Notice that that hand/text area and the background all are
fuchsias, blues and purples. All of these colors have some amount of blue in them, and are considered
‘cool’ in temperature. In order to draw the eye toward the cupcake, I used warm colors, colors that would
contain some amount of yellow. The green surrounding the cupcake contain yellow (yellow + blue = green),
and I shaded the pink frosting with orange (yellow + red = orange) to warm it up! The cherry girl’s skirt is
green and yellow, and the cake portion of the cupcake is a warm brown (which also contains yellow.) I left
the collaged ‘pointing hand’ a neutral gray so as not to stand out more than it already does; the gray is tied
into the color composition by the silver I used around the border of the card.
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