Chirag-Mehta has done an amazing amount of research trying to pin down some common names for colors. Name That Color allows you to pick a hue and then play with all the variations to see what names come up. Its fun! The diagram you will use to select the colors is based on the HSL color space. Thanks […]
Smashing Color
with Maggie Maggio
Page 13 of 15
I spent the summer flying and teaching. My first stop was at the The Fiber Studio in Henniker, New Hampshire for a two day Smashing Color Workshop. The Fiber Studio is a colorful store filled with stunningly beautiful yarns for knitters and weavers – very inspirational! The workshop was held in the store’s classroom; a […]
If you have some time this weekend to play with color symbolism – here’s a fun interactive site produced a few years ago by Claudia Cortes as her thesis project for the MFA in Computer Graphic Design at Rochester Institute of Technology. The project received Best of Category honors in the I.D. Magazine 2004 Student Design Review […]
Value is the most difficult of the three properties of color to see correctly. Hue is very easy – we are used to putting colors into their family groups. Saturation is easy once you get the hang of it – colors are clear, muted, or muddy. But value often stumps us. Color theory books traditionally illustrate a value […]
I’ve been busy working on the planning for the National Polymer Clay Guild Conference next February. The Request for Proposals deadline was last Tuesday and we have over 100 proposals to review! In the middle of all this Joey and I did manage to get one of the two videos we are working on ready […]
Variations of chartreuse have been popular for at least the last eight years and the color seems to keep getting hotter and hotter. Dante Marioni’s Chartreuse Trio 2006 Fall 2006 Runway Guide As I work on making sample triangles with different clays and different primaries I am struck by the amazing range of chartreuses […]
The best way to show the full gamut or range of colors that can be mixed from three primaries is with a triangle and, just like the color scales, there are two variations of color triangles; arithmetric and geometric. Mathematical vs Visual Balance Arithmetric Triangles put the 1/2:1/2 mixes (in the sample they are labeled 4/4) in the middle position […]
Yesterday was the first day of spring and I am wondering if the monarch butterflies have started their flights from Mexico back to the U.S. I just finished Four Wings and a Prayer by Sue Halpern, a book about the mystery of monarch butterfly migration. It was a fabulous look inside the scientific world and a […]
Color scales are step-by-step mixes showing the range of colors that you get by mixing two colors in different proportions. You can use any two colors to make scales. The first one I did was black to white, then I tried red to yellow, yellow to blue and blue back to yellow to get the […]
A few years ago my daughter spent some time in India and Nepal. She was there during Holi – the Hindu Festival of Colors. She knew I would love to hear about a celebration that involves throwing and squirting colors at complete strangers so she called home, a rare event, to tell me all about it. […]
“My heart leaps up when I behold a Rainbow in the sky.” William Wordsworth I live in a place with lots of rainbows – Portland, Oregon. When the sun breaks out in the late afternoon on a rainy day, I run to look out my kitchen window. The sunshine means that the rain has moved […]
I watched the Academy Awards and was thrilled when Helen Mirren won for “The Queen.” I thought she looked great. Loved the gown. My mom is Canadian and whenever we visited my grandparents in Saskatchewan I saw pictures of the Queen. Not the most fashionable of monarchs but I always thought she was beautiful, probably […]
I think a lot about the connections between the environment, social justice and art. Today they all came together when I found Chris Jordan’s latest collection of photographs “Running the Numbers: An American Portrait“. Jordon skewers our out-of-control consumer culture by turning photos into oversized pointillist collages. The image above is a detail of his […]
Painted Cats is the subject line of one of those constantly circulating emails making the rounds of cyber space. My cousin forwarded this one to me. He was very upset about the cruel anesthetizing of these poor cats as they got their $15,000 paint jobs. That sounded fishy to me so I checked Snopes.com and sure […]
Complementary colors are shown opposite each other on most color wheels, but what is often missing is the neutral color in the center. There are at least four variations of complementary color wheels, each with a different neutral color in the center. Wheel #1: Spectral Complements Spectral complements mix to make white light. The value […]
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