Pigment Futures: Reimagining Emotional Promises in Color and Animation
This one-hour workshop invites participants to explore how color, gesture, and texture can act as emotional cartographies in moments of anxiety. Through rapid painting, digitization, and collective animation, we will test how visual promises—kept, broken, and reimagined—shift meaning when moving from pigment to pixel, and speculate on new ways illustration might support emotional regulation.
Pigment Futures: Reimagining Emotional Promises in Color and Animation is an experimental workshop that explores how painting and animation can act as tools for navigating emotional states, particularly moments of anxiety.
Together, we will create quick, intuitive paintings responding to three prompts—kept promises, broken promises, and reimagined promises—a framework that reflects how we place expectations on both analog materials and digital spaces to calm, ground, or distract us. Participants will then see their painted gestures translated into a simple collective animation, creating a moving environment where color, texture, and rhythm shift meaning.
Rather than relying on fixed ideas from color psychology (such as “blue is calming” or “red is alarming”), this workshop foregrounds the unpredictable, relational nature of pigment and motion. What feels soothing on paper may intensify on screen; what begins as jagged or chaotic may transform into something grounding when looped in animation.
