Analysis of the use of color and its emotional relationship in visual creations based on experiences during the context of the COVID-19 pandemic

TL;DR

This study investigates how color usage in COVID-19 related art on Instagram reflects emotional states, employing neural networks and clustering to analyze color-emotion relationships during the pandemic.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology combining emotion classification and color analysis to explore emotional expression in pandemic-related visual art.

Findings

Warm colors dominate the dataset.

Analog color compositions are preferred over complementary.

Positive emotions are associated with specific color attributes.

Abstract

Color is a complex communicative element that helps us understand and evaluate our environment. At the level of artistic creation, this component influences both the formal aspects of the composition and the symbolic weight, directly affecting the construction and transmission of the message that you want to communicate, creating a specific emotional reaction. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people generated countless images transmitting this event's subjective experiences. Using the repository of images created in the Instagram account CAM (The COVID Art Museum), we propose a methodology to understand the use of color and its emotional relationship in this context. The process considers two stages in parallel that are then combined. First, emotions are extracted and classified from the CAM dataset images through a convolutional neural network. Second, we extract the colors and their harmonies through a clustering process. Once both processes are completed, we combine the results generating an expanded discussion on the usage of color, harmonies, and emotion. The results indicate that warm colors are prevalent in the sample, with a preference for analog compositions over complementary ones. The relationship between emotions and these compositions shows a trend in positive emotions, reinforced by the results of the algorithm a priori and the emotional relationship analysis of the attributes of color (hue, chroma, and lighting).