Curley Chen

In the Talking Color part of my project, I mainly focused on orchids as my main object. Orchids have many colors and soft changes between light and dark, which makes them a good subject for exploring emotions in color. My goal in this part is to learn how the different materials, tones, and textures can show my feelings and ideas about beauty.

When I use color pencils, I didn’t draw the outlines at the beginning. I started with large blocks of color and let the colors create the shape of the flower by themselves. This way felt more natural to me. Sometimes I only used one color, like blue or pink, and I showed the bright and shadow parts by changing the lightness and darkness of the same color. When I used many colors, I liked to choose colors from the same family — all warm or all cool tones. I think this can make the painting look more comfortable and balanced. For example, when I worked with cool colors, I used blue for the light side and purple for the dark side, to show how the light and shadow change naturally on the petals.

Usually, I started by putting big color areas on the paper first, then drew the orchid’s shape on top with a thin pencil line. This method often gave me unexpected results, because I could not fully control how the final picture would look. But I liked this part of the process, because it added a sense of mystery and made the painting more alive and emotional.

In my first piece, shown in Figure 1, I used a strong magenta background. This bright and deep color made the painting look very powerful, even a bit heavy. The organic lines in this work seem to be moving or breathing, which made me feel that the orchid is full of life. I also used silver foil in this piece, not just for decoration, but to make the picture feel more alive. The silver foil can reflect light, and when the light changes, it looks like the color is talking to the magenta, making the picture more active and brighter.

 (finger 1)

The second painting (Figure 2) was made when I felt calm and peaceful. I used yellow as the main color because it feels warm and happy to me. It reminds me of sunshine, fresh bread, and quiet afternoons. In this work, I didn’t try to make perfect shapes. Instead, I let the colors mix naturally and form their own shapes. I used darker and lighter yellows to show the form and structure. This made the painting look more natural and fuller of emotion.

(picture 2)

Through this creative process, I learned that Talking Color is not only about using color — it is also about communicating with colors. Every color has its own feeling. Red feels strong and passionate, blue feels calm, and green feels relaxing. When I was painting, I could really feel these emotions in my work. The process helped me express my feelings and understand myself better. I enjoy it because it made me feel more connected to my art and my emotions.

In this task, I employed a variety of different media and materials for creation, such as acrylic paint, watercolor, markers, paper-cutting, oil pastels, tissues paper, and acrylic ink. Among these different media, they can also be combined to produce different effects. for making patters, first select a picture and then patting. after that, first enlarge an area and then draw a detail picture. The third step is to determine the shape and start making the pattern.

In this work I choose orchids as the main item for this creation because orchids are different in each region. For instance, they have different shapes in the UK and in China. Among these dozen or so paintings, I employed various media for creation, such as acrylic, colored pencils, syringes, pencil, pastel and silver foil. The effects of drawing on paper of different colours are also different.