melanqoli: Yikes, how is it Thursday already? I knew this week was going to be a transition week, si

melanqoli:

Yikes, how is it Thursday already? I knew this week was going to be a transition week, since I’ve been switching gears to work on a different part of the thesis, but ugh.. i wish I had more to show for myself. I did manage to finish my outline, identify and import 1000+ useable words from my dissertation prospectus (which I had approved waaaay back in Fall 2016 ) and write 500 words of new material. But that’s pretty much it. Well, I’ve done some RA work too, which I guess is cool because I need the money, but thesis progress has been slow.

A campus-wide power outage threw a wrench into my plans on Tuesday, but I can’t blame it all on that. I just haven’t been managing my time that well. I’ve spent quite a few hours this week working on and learning about illustrations, which is NOT helping me finish my thesis, though it is satisfying some other part of me. Something that’s really fascinating me right now is the way that light effects perception of colour. Like, for example, the colour of a person’s skin at sunset is…. not what you think it is! I’ve been racking my brain (and the internet) trying to figure out how this phenomenon works, but I haven’t found any clear, comprehensive explanation - perhaps because there isn’t one. I have a friend who went to art school, and I asked her whether trained artists understand this stuff, like, scientifically - or whether they use references to achieve the effect they want. She said it’s a combination of both.

With that in mind, I’ve been playing around with colours a bit this week, trying to convey more complex lighting in my illustrations. Obviously, I’m a complete beginner, and these efforts are pretty crude, but the process has been super instructive. The images above are from some of my in-progress pieces. I included two renditions of the blond character, wearing the same shirt, but one of them is in colour-balanced (neutral) white light, and the other is in orangey, sunset lighting. You can see how much I had to adjust the colours to convey the change in lighting. I’m STILL adjusting them, actually, and I have no idea how deep the shadows should be on the one character’s shirt… so I’m kind of stuck

Anyways, enough of that. I gotta get to work on that thesis introduction. I don’t even know what goals to set, honestly, because the document is such a mess, but I’m just going to commit to having the file open for three hours and see what happens. Then, I’m headed to the library to do some good ole fashioned research… with books!