Talking Colour/ Talking Pattern – Qingyuan Yang

I found this lovely piece from a market in Shoreditch, and here’s the collage

To complete this task, I and my team members went to Shoreditch and started exploring and discovering the surrounding area, taking the local market as the center. First, we went to Spitalfields Market. Fortunately, I found many ethnic costumes there, especially the cute little jackets from Nepal. I carefully observed each piece of clothing and discovered that each one was further embroidered on a multi-layered fabric base. In the paintings, I attempted to reproduce the patterns on those jackets. I tried using different painting materials, such as crayons, watercolors, markers, and colored pencils. I tried to enhance the color impact of the picture by using contrasting colors, and this did not make the picture look uncoordinated; instead, it could add some interesting elements to the picture. During the exploration of different media and painting materials, I discovered many interesting painting techniques. For example, in two watercolor blending paintings, I first wet the drawing paper and kept it with sufficient moisture. Then I dropped the paint on the paper, allowing the different colors to blend naturally. This randomness often creates many unexpected results. After that, I moved the still-wet paper to the sunlight for natural drying. At this time, I sprinkled some salt on the paper, which caused many shapes similar to flowers to appear on the paper, which made me very surprised. In future projects, I will continue to explore the different effects of painting materials and try to use more different materials as my drawing paper, and learn more different color combinations, so that I can get more interesting color combination schemes. I felt very excited in this task. I got the opportunity to explore London and learned the clothing combination schemes of people from different regions. This made me learn many things that I had never understood before.

When working on the “talking pattern” project, I spent most of my time focusing on details. Not only the details of plants, such as the holes made by insects or each stem on the leaves, but also the stretched holes on fabrics, as well as the blooming shapes of flower buds or petals, all of these could serve as sources of inspiration for my paintings. When choosing colors, I tried to select natural colors, such as different shades of green, grass green, dark green, mint green… Afterwards, I would first draw a rough shape with a pen, and then start creating using different colors. I think the most challenging part in the entire painting process lies in finding interesting small parts on a seemingly ordinary object, and through abstraction, eventually transforming them into patterns. The method I use most frequently is by using the viewfinder of my phone camera. I took many different photos and used various techniques, such as zooming in or rotating the photos. However, through this approach, it actually helped me better identify the parts I liked in each trial, and then transform these parts into the final pattern.Regarding the use of colors, I first try to reproduce the colors I have seen, and then use some more distinct colors based on this foundation. I think my inspiration comes from the natural colors and the colors during sunset. I think they are truly beautiful, and they are also part of nature. Moreover, I can observe the use of contrasting colors in nature.