Dabblings In Colour Scheme (Childhood Room)

I didn't manage to include this into my prepwork. So I'm gonna do it on my e-portfolio. It's hard to explain and describe it, because when I say 'green', people are gonna think 'what green? dark green? lime green? moss green? dirty green?'. So.. I hope my attempt at being specific and detailed works. Because I'm going to describe what sort of colour scheme I had in mind for each of my rooms with the help of some pictures.

Childhood Room
I wanted something fantasy-like. Because, as a child, I was always inspired by things like princesses, Barbie shows, magic, etc. I wanted something that could excite a child and make him/her believe in magic, something that could be really soothing. So this is what my childhood room sort-of looks like:



For the flooring, I intended to use faux grass carpets, like in an enchanted forest. And as for the walls, I wanted something like.. a mural of an enchanted forest. Like in these two images below:




As for the bed, I would have made the sheets baby blue or baby pink, depending on the child's gender, and as for the canopy, I wanted translucent curtains.



The initial colour I thought of was yellow, because yellow daylilies (the flower which I took inspiration from) looked best in yellow. But pastel blue/pink and bright yellow seemed strange. So, I think beige or white. Then I think the shape of the overturned daylily flower itself is going to be wired inside.. I'm not sure how they make these things.

The window seat would be wooden with cushion on top. I was thinking light, fair wood. Because it better suits the frequency of the rest of the room, which is pastel and soft. But there are so many kinds of wood.. I'm not sure which is light/fair and used for furniture.

The crocus wardrobe would be a gradient purple, like a crocus flower (from the inside to the tip of the petals):



Lastly, the dandelion-inspired lights. The main feature of a dandelion is that its seeds fly really beautifully. I hoped to incorporate such natural beauty into my design. I mean, normally people have dandelion murals on their walls like these:




But instead of paint on a wall, I'd change them to popup dandelion-shaped lights. There's an example of dandelion-shaped lights which I found online:




It looked so much better than I could have imagined myself. So, my dandelion lights are a fusion of both. The arrangement from the mural and the lights from the circuit example.

Overall, in my imagination, it looks really like an enchanted forest. However, I'm quite sure that young boys will not like this room, and may even find it too 'girly'? I'm not sure, what do young boys want nowadays? Things like racing cars, action figure heroes, football, right?

The Search for Inspiration

My greatest difficulty when designing the elderly room was inspiration. I did not know where to get my inspirations from. My entire coursework is about the different stages in life, like what each stage is all about and the general characteristics of people in these stages. My childhood room is about being natural and it's organic, and my adulthood room is about being burdened by the different aspects in life and thus losing freedom and becoming rigid. I was once a child, so I know what it's like. I'm almost an adult, so I know some things, and I can imagine some things. But, I'm far from being an elderly, and I don't know much about the elderly!! I can't seem to capture the mindset of the elderly. What exactly do they do with their time? What do their lives revolve around now that their prime time has passed? What do they think about all the time? I hadn't a clue.

I didn't know what were the general characteristics of life as an elderly. So it was purely based on imagination and gut feeling. First I did research, blind research. I simply Googled 'elderly' and scrolled randomly, waiting for inspiration to hit me. It helped a little, but not much. Soon I thought of some things. Maybe I could give the room different themes like the '60s, or the '70s. Or maybe I could use old technology to create furniture, old technology like gramophones. Still, the categories were really broad, I needed something more specific. Not all elderly come from the '60s, not all elderly reminiscence about their pasts.. It was seriously diverse, to me at least.

In the end, I decided to just go with the flow - no definite theme. I would use some daily objects as inspiration when designing furniture, and then give a certain 'old age'/'antique' feeling to the room. The idea of using daily objects came from Rene Magritte's "Personal Values" (below).



Though her usage of daily objects didn't serve a realistic purpose, like you can't sleep on the bed if the comb is there, I, on the other hand, would create furniture out of daily objects that serve a realistic purpose. Example, maybe I could transform a shoe into a chair?

After awhile, I started to find a colour scheme for this room. The childhood room was cheerful and earthly, and the adult room was minimalist (sort of), just a combination of black and white and maybe a 3rd colour that wasn't dull (red/blue/yellow/green/purple?). I also needed to know what sort of textures or materials I might use for the elderly room. With the desired texture/material in mind, it allows me to design furniture accordingly. For this aspect, I immediately thought of the Old French/Victorian/Baroque era. When I look at a room designed in the Victorian/Baroque style, it feels warm, comfortable, inviting...






Feels luxurious, and commands respect as though its royalty. There seems to be common traits in rooms that are designed in such a way. Traits such as.. intricate carvings and details on each furniture. There never seems to be a plain surface, everything is curved in or out, like a path that has been walked on before. The beds in these bedrooms are also kind of exaggerated, the duvets enhance the magnificence of the already-fancy headboards, and it appears really majestic. All these, together with the addition of a lavish rug and a posh chandelier, seem to highlight olden beauty? If I were to link it with the concept of the elderly, I think they matched relatively well.

However, as grand as Victorian rooms were, and as much as I liked the idea of rooms that command respect, it didn't fit a 100% with my concept of what an elderly is like. I feel that, having lived a long life full of ups and downs, an elderly would probably wish to settle down, tone down the excitement in their lives, and slow down the pace of life. To them, many things in live probably would be like, 'Oh, been there, done that', and not much amazes them anymore. So, to counter this problem, and if I really want to use the Victorian idea, I would have to simplify the intricacies until it fits into my frequency, until it's exactly what I want.

Before, I didn't have any direction and I didn't know what I wanted, so it was hard to get going and I felt like I was lagging behind in my prep work. Afterwards, I produced a somewhat solid concept of what kind of elderly room I want. I want simplified Victorian, with bits of everyday objects infused into it, so as to show that the elderly are living the end of their lives and have probably experienced a bit of most things in life.

It Started With Sims...

The two possible art careers I would ever consider are fashion design or interior design. When I tried out fashion design last year, I realized that I wasn't really into it. Interior design, however, means a whole different thing to me.

I suppose my interest in interior design sprouted from a simple, addictive game called Sims. I like the game Sims because it was fun, but apart from the main game, I was also really fascinated with the graphics, the character design, and of course, the interior design. Whenever I started a new family, I would take 20 minutes or so to design the architecture of a house, and then take hours to painstakingly do the interior. Each and every room had a colour theme, and I simply chose any object that looked pleasing to the eye in that particular room.

In such a casual situation, I was able to create rather amazing rooms if I may say so myself. The slideshow below contains a some images of my creations. At that point of time, these screenshots were taken with the intention to capture the game's events, but I chose the ones that showcased the background design/house architecture more and made them into a slideshow. So this slideshow is really more of a preview, for myself, to summarise what I can do.

I am now in the midst of considering interior design for my coursework. I really, really want to do it, even though I have never had any professional experience in doing floor plans or anything like that...