Playing With Colour I

Colour seems to be a topic of both great satisfaction and (at times) great consternation among those of us who create with it: intense delight in a beautiful colourway, intense frustration and needless insecurity in attempting to create that pleasure from scratch. 

Much like food and music, the experience of colour is heavily influenced by cultural conditioning and emotional associations, therefore I don't believe that "rules" can adequately govern such a subjective experience, nor are there Right or Wrong combinations.  There are however, colourways that evoke a desired personal response, or capture the essence of an object or phenomenon more or less successfully, and a basic ability to analyze the attributes of a successful colour or combination can aid immensely in understanding how to create or emulate a particular effect.  I really believe the search for a winning colour "formula" is futile - worse than that, it circumvents a rich world of exploration and mindful seeing.

I suppose I should make the disclaimer that I have no degrees in the arts (just mundane things like microbial genetics and medicine) and I certainly make no claims that this is the only, or even the best way to approach the topic.  All I am really doing is sharing the fruits of a bit of research, and ideas for looking closely at the beauty around you - because I really believe Nature is the best teacher.

Once I declared my intent to write about this, I found it tough to divide the topic into discreet sections, but I thought it made sense to start where I started - and introduce some features of the software tool I use along the way.  PhotoFiltre is a freeware photoeditor (no business association whatsoever - it works, it's available to everyone, the price was right when I needed it.)  The functions and tools I use are very basic, and I'm quite sure are available in most commercial photoediting programs.

So.... let's start with a seemingly simple phenomenon: a clear blue summer sky.

(Simple enough, in fact, to gain ubiquity as a crayon.)

PhotoFiltre has a number of tools in the pull-down "filtre" menu (top row) that are useful for teasing out component colours, but my favorite is the Artistic -> Watercolour -> 1 option.  (Another neat tool is the Stylize -> Mosaic, though I find that a bit rigid.  All a matter of personal choice.)

A slice of sky given the above treatments:

Here's where it gets fun.  Go to the right hand menu column, select the dropper and suck up a colour from your picture.  Open a fresh page (blank page, far left on the horizontal menu), go to filtre -> other -> grid generator, decide how big the squares should be (40 pixels gives a nice chunk of colour) and create your blank palette.  Now back to the vertical menu on the right, select the paint bucket and fill in a square with the colour you just sucked up.  Carry on for as long as you like, sucking up shades from different parts of your photo and dropping them in your palette. (You don't actually have to alter the photo at all before doing this, but I find it helps me to see the component colours more readily.)

What you do with that palette is a topic for another day, but the simple act of creating it will cause you to take a closer look at "common" things.

Some of the loveliest surprises come from subjects normally considered to have lost their beauty, such as these November leaves, long since discarded by their branches and rendered brown and sodden by a week of rain.

Using the watercolour function:

They turn out to be a delicious confection of chocolate and lavender.

Next week: some basic colour theory, and how to play with it onscreen.

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I would love to hear any comments or questions, and please do let me know if I've been unclear about any part of the process. 

Comments

[Cara]

You are a genius. Thank you.

[Netter]

Thank you! I don't know if I could handle true color "theory." I burned my brain on a semester of semiotics in college. I love to see what you do with color and how you do it.

[Emilee]

Thank you for sharing this with us! Since reading your blog yesterday, I've been playing around with it a bit myself. It is so much fun to break down photos and really look at the colors. I'm learning a lot from your posts here.

[Lee Ann]

For the third photo with the grid on it and one colour per square, how did you get that? Did you impose a grid onto it?

And also? Wow. Just, wow.

[Dorre]

that is so amazingly cool pulling the colors out of photos... can't wait for the next installment of this. ;)

[Carole]

I am amazed at the range and depth of colors you were able to draw out using that software and your photos.

[Reve]

i love this technique. i consider myself colour combo challanged and this just lets nature do its thing!! beautiful.

[margene]

I'm so glad that Cara pointed people your way. Your way of looking at color is so inspriational!

[kelpkim]

I'm here from Cara's blog as well and wow!
that is so cool! i'm giving a class on how to dye yarn with Kool-Aid and wanted to learn more about color theory (i got a book by deb menz too) so this is really great to see! it's amazing how colors mix together and create these beautiful scenes--in nature and in our knitting! :o)thanks!

[Charity]

I so love the way your mind works, Ruth. I'm definitely going to be giving this a try soon. :0) Thank you for sharing all this with us!

[Kirsten]

This is the best of discussions for those of us who create, regardless of the medium. Finding confidence with, and the joy in playing with color is the surest route to satisfaction in the creative process! Your photos perfectly illustrate why we should not be so quick to judge and discard a combination of colors. Should we take the time to look a little deeper we may find sublime beauty in the apparently mundane.

Thank you for starting this discussion!!

[dhyana rose]

*
Thank you so much for the program.
I have been trying to figure out something like this in photoshop and it's just too much work.
I hope you will post with instructions on how to actually get the squares of color like with the brown leaves.
Cheers !

*

[Cassandra]

Hi, I popped over from Cara's blog too. I am a graphic designer and work with all these fancy schmancy design programs and deal with color every day. But I NEVER thought to pull color from life for my knitting like you have shown here. Just goes to show that good ideas can come from anyone, as long as they have the guts to share. Thank you!

[Ann]

I'm visiting from Cara's blog as well. I love the leaf picture as it is, but I gasped at the color play when you teased it out. Now. Will someone design me a fair isle sweater with just those colors in it? Thank you.

[melanie]

I get my inspiration with everyday products around the house.Sometimes I will be stressing for color ideas and dye my yarns the same colorway as my bleach bottle.
I've never really thought of doing it with a photo,though it's a great idea.

[Rosemary]

I love this discussion that you have started.
I always have trouble trying to decide if a colour has a bit of another in it. For awhile I decided I'd been second guessed all my life. Is it peach, salmon, coral?
If I decide to play with watercolour, I will take a fabric or coloured paper and try to duplicate it.
Your whole discussion is really on looking and seeing the detail and not just assuming we know the colours. It is the unexpected little variation or contrast that sparks our work.

[PICAdrienne]

Very neat way to come up with color combinations otherwise not thought of by my brain. Nature really is never wrong about color combinations.

[Jessica]

This is really interesting, I'm glad Cara told people about your post today. I might try this out with a few favorite pictures to distill their color essence.

[Kristy]

Thanks for posting this! It's very interesting to see all the different colors that come out of one picture. I did some color studies once on a log burning in my fireplace. It was quite fun :)

[Christina]

Very cool. I'll have to give it a try. I wonder what comes next in this series. Can't wait. (P.S. I'm also running a contest on my blog right now in case you're interested.)

[Christene / Sheepspyjamas]

Excellent... After reading, the grid, the taking colors from photos, all seems elementary, but I'd never have tried it on my own... I'll definitely be following along; thanks!

[tiennie]

I love seeing these on your site! Glad that more people are going to be visiting and seeing them too 'cause watch out! Cara's linked to you again!

[Joanne]

We always knew you were amazing! Truly. It's wonderful to watch you embrace this new avenue that life and creativity has brought your way. Look at all these comments.......enjoy them! Cheers!

[Dipsy D.]

What an awesome post - I'm in awe of the beautiful way you have with words, they went straight into my heart. Thank you for that!

[maryse]

this is fascinating. thank you. it doesn't look like this software is mac compatible though. i'll be visiting often to see what else you come up with.