Jet Set Radio color study

Value and Composition

I choose this piece because for one I love the style and perspective of this shot but I also noticed immediately that the value range is strictly midtones for the most part so I knew I would discover some interesting details about the color and value relationship. Here you can see I've taken the time to go through and note each value as i find it on the value scale. What I noticed immediately while doing this is that the placement of these characters is very specifically set up to group all of the major values together. We can start with the foreground figure, the foreground figure gives us some dept and extra overlap with the two characters to his right but it also is interesting to note that he is in a close value range of a 6 compared to the background which is a 7. 

Above I've dimmed down the image to show how the dark values are grouped together and connect the different characters to one another. We can see there is some very subtle  connections here and some that are way more obvious. The giant dark shape that sits in the middle and the dark shape that creates the silhouette of the head of our front most character and the beatbox is connected to the shadows running throughout the other characters hats. We also see the 4 value of the guy highlighted in yellow also connects to the 4 value in the female behind him. 

Some other things to notice about the value is that the values plays into the design of the characters themselves and even without the color in play we feel as if these characters fit together. For example the girl in the back and the girl in the middle both use a variation of a stripped pattern, but its used in a opposite way and with differing values. To differentiate them further a darker value is used on the asian girl in the background for her jacket and a lighter value is used for the  vest that covers the white girl in the front. We also see differing elements in the scruffiness of the jacket. We see the same use of patterns in the main protagonists shirt, we see a pattern of 3 in his shirt, and he has elements of sunglasses and ear phones that are repeated elsewhere in the pic with the asian girl and the guy in the background. 

Other values contrast with one another. The black girl in the back has dark skin and we have a pattern break at her stomach which gives it a binary value structure. 

Color

When analyzing the color in this piece I first took samples of some of the main color areas and then went ahead and tried to match the colors together. Surprisingly I was pretty close most of the time. I took notes to show that sometimes I had the color close but it needed to go alittle down or a little up and over to be a right match. Often times I have the habit of not making it as saturated of a color as it should be. 

With the color back on now we can begin to analyze and compare some of the things we noticed about the value structure and how this relates to color. The first thing to notice is that these colors are actually very flat with no real shadow shapes at first glance but what is interesting about them is that he is able to suggest a turn in form with a simple color and shape change. For example when we look at the character to the left we notice that in terms of value the face of him and the face of the lightskinned characters in this piece is pretty much the same or very close. This goes for the value of his jacket as well which is the same value as the main character. But the main character's shirt looks darker, why is that? 

Because the shirt is slightly more orange and slightly more saturated than his. If you pay attention closely to the faces there is a color difference in the guys face as well, with the nose of the figure slightly redder than the cheek. This creates a very subtle color and value shift that is almost unnoticable to the untrained eye. Its like he is creating very subtle color transitions with shapes to differentiate the forms without having to rely on lines. His lines instead are very minimalistic and this minimalistic lines in the face contrasts to the lines in the clothes.

The blue in this piece, because of the colors surrounding it, actually isnt blue although it appears to be. What it is actually is a midtone orange with a good amount of desaturation going on to push it back. However in this orange context the color looks blue. We see something similar with the other blue figure on the right. I mean it looks blue, however once we sample it we see it is a desaturated red, pink. Why is this? I think it may have something to do with Simultaneous contrast.

Simultaneous contrast could be acting in acouple of different ways here. For one the duller color next to the brighter more saturated colors make it look more muted thus pushing the color of the orange to seem more vibrant than it is. But also it could be that a cooler color next to a warm color looks cooler than it actually is. This is a interesting concept that I tried to explore a little bit with taking some of the desaturated colors and placing them on backgrounds of varying colors. We can see this effect on the right with the desaturated red/pink looking purplish and darker, but when we add darker tones it can feel neutral or even a little reddish.

For the yellow we see it has a green tint in the first few square where it is on a orangish background, but then we see it feels more like its dull yellow self on the darker more redder backgrounds. This is an exercise in observation that I will look for in other pieces that I analyze from here on out.