Design 1: Perception and Color
Gray
Originally uploaded by Sam Felder.
I've spent the last two weeks mixing black and white gouache paint in an attempt to create a perfect nine-step scale from white to black.
The technique is to aim for the mid-point. You start with white and then black. Once those have dried you start mixing to get a perfect halfway point. This is surprisingly difficult. Fifty-percent black in Illustrator and what the eye perceives as halfway are two different things. For the purpose of this class, the latter is all that matters. What I am trying to create are color squares that are so perfectly between their neighbors that a human observer will experience the illusion of simultaneous contrast.
To help us think about the illusions we can experience when looking at color, our professor pointed us to some examples at Edward Adelson's site at MIT. This checkerboard example was the hardest for me to accept but it does work. The same color can appear to be completely different from itself in the same design if the context changes.
These illusions are what we are trying to learn how to control. The hard part is reproducing the color correctly. I must say that as frustrating an experience as this assignment is becoming, I find that my eye is getting better. I've now painted almost a hundred swatches. At the beginning I didn't really know what to look for and now I think that I'm really getting somewhere.
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