Yellow, Red, Black, Blue, and Grey: Deconstructing Mondrian’s Colors

Deconstructing Mondrian by docpop
Deconstructing Mondrian by docpop

The work of several well known artists entered the public domain this year, including Edvard Munch, Glenn Miller, Ian Flemming, and Piet Mondrian. I’ve been thinking a lot about colors lately, having written last week about Apple’s new color palette, so I thought it would be fun to dive into Mondrian’s colors this week.

The palette:

I think Mondrian’s work is often thought of as having cartoonishly vibrant colors, but when you look at his paintings now you’ll notice the blues and yellows are a little dull, while the white has a little yellow/grey in it. Whether this was due to 70 years of aging, limitations of paints in his time, or intentional choices made by the artist himself, I can’t be sure. I tried for my palette to represent how his paintings appear now and you can download it an .ACO file here.

Mondrians_Crayons
Color by COLOURlovers

The gif:

To dive in a little deeper, I then took this palette and started building Mondrian inspired pieces as “trixel art” using Hexels Pro.

via GIPHY

Then I finally made “Deconstructing Mondrian”, the piece that appears at the top of this post, using Photoshop’s animation and layering tools.


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2 responses to “Yellow, Red, Black, Blue, and Grey: Deconstructing Mondrian’s Colors

  1. […] Yellow, Red, Black, Blue, and Grey: Deconstructing Mondrian’s Colors […]

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