Journal Exercise 1 - The Colours of Valentine's Day

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The Colours of Valentine's Day

Even though the sentiment and the graphics of Valentine’s Day are mostly marketing executive created, the images and objects of Valentine's Day surround us on February 14 every year. The bright reds and baby pinks. A colour scheme that by certain tastes may be a bit garish but the colours of those objects that surround us on Valentine’s Day are deeply ingrained in to our “colour beliefs”. If they change colour, they no longer have any day on the calendar that they belong to.

In the first example, I altered the colour of a nice hearted shaped box of chocolate. The heart shape symbolizes love and the bright saturated red symbolizing that it’s intended for a romantic partner. So once you take the red out of the equation, and in my case make the box black, the meaning and symbolize COMPLETELY change. With the black and the blue box, one would expect to receive this box at a funeral. It’s colour now implies mourning but the shape stills says love. The same line of thinking applies to cupid. When red, cupid looks like he brings the message/symbolism of love but when cupid is pitch black, he looks he has been sent to bring you a special message of death. Black, in our culture, has a profound implied meaning of death and the unknown.

The coloured valentine’s day candy in the last example may not follow the red and pink colour scheme mentioned previously but the pastel colours and cutesy sentiments on the candy imply a softness. Once the candy colour scheme is changed to deep blues and purples, the candy looks inedible or if you take to many, you may not wake up. The blues imply something medicinal and stark.

Most of the time colour is tricking our minds and our pre-determined beliefs on “how things are”. Your mind needs to categorize things and put it in it’s predetermined place otherwise, we’d be on overload all the time so when your mind sees that black box of chocolates, it doesn't fit in the Valentine’s Day category anymore, it has to belongs elsewhere and because of historical/political/social uses of the colour black and the shape of a heart, our brain puts it in it’s nice little category of funeral…..well because it fits.