Colour Crush Creative experiments

Well howdy. Don't' worry I've not been wandering lost in a desert for several months I've just been too lazy and too unenthused to blog. In an attempt to try and get myself back in the swing of doing something other than binge watching pretty much anything on Netflix I signed up to Color Crush Creative. I get an email every Friday with a new colour palette to help inspire me to, ya know, do art.

So for the past two weeks I have indeed done just that. I've made some digital art based on the colour palettes and I've also explored a couple of new techniques. The first image is based on this Friday's palette, number 40, or 'garden room'. As the colour palette was inpsired by lush foliage I thought might seek out a leafy image to play with and went with this one via Pexels.

The palette this week was also made up of peaches to contrast with the greens which are the colours I've used for the gradient. I also ran my colourised image through a couple of scripts in Processing (you can read my blog post about that here) to add some texture to the image and white outlines you can see.

The weeks before palette was called 'happy dance' and was made up of four purple colours, an orange and a blue. I tried to mainly focus on using the purple colours for this swirling, marbled image (of which the above is a crop of) but I couldn't help myself and added a few hints of the blue and orange. To add those colours in I used these great Photoshop smoke brushes and messed around with the layer blend modes until I found something that worked. Then I obviously added a noise filter as I seem to be in to lots of grain at the moment.

I also wanted to try and make something with a more liquid/fluid effect so I used my final larger image as I really enjoyed the colour combo and added a few extra bits of the lighter blue until I was happy. This took a lot of patience with the smudge tool but was actually easier than I thought it would be to achieve outside of the liquify filter.

No doubt I'll end up messing around with the colour palettes and images again so I might even have to do a part two to this post as I have a few more ideas I want to play with.