Yellow Submarine Yellow Submarine

Oh the good old Beatles. My Dad and his brother are both huge fans, as would be pretty much anyone of that generation? Of course not that they don't have a legacy to be enjoyed by many generations after them, but that was certainly the hey day. I visited a few Beatles spots when I went to London, but I've never been a huge source of knowledge on the subject. On their use of color, I really like the music video. And I really appreciate the art behind it, much more than so many music videos today. Even though the Beatles may have been singing about some unsavory topics (someone brought up Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds), I think at least that the video isn't too in your face with unsavory topics. To clarify, I think that music videos nowadays are taking the "sex sells" idea and just shoving it our faces. Just because it sells, doesn't mean it's the only way to sell. I think the Yellow Submarine video is fun and colorful and makes you feel very whimsical, I was tempted to dance around a little bit. It's all sort of silly, and I like it.

Pointillism - Seurat

Here is a portion of one of Georges Seurat's most famous pointillism paintings, The Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Per Wikipedia, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte shows members of each of the social classes participating in various park activities. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint allow the viewer's eye to blend colors optically, rather than having the colors physically blended on the canvas. It took Seurat two years to complete this 10-foot-wide (3.0 m) painting, much of which he spent in the park sketching in preparation for the work (there are about 60 studies). It is now in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago."

I know this work because at the end of Mission Impossible 2, Ethan and his lady disappear into a very similar looking park in Australia. The use of pointillism creates beautiful color in the painting. 

Adelson's Lightness

Admittedly, Adelson’s paper has me out of my depth. I had to read each paragraph two or three times to try to understand the message. I did particularly enjoy the optical illusions though, and after a couple of readings could grasp most of what was being conveyed about our visual perception systems in so far as they related to the illusions. My preferred section of the paper was Helmholtz view that “what we perceive is our visual system’s best guess as to what is in the world.” I’ve always found optical tests interesting in so far as the brain can sometimes compensate for things the eyes cannot see. I’ve also always been fascinated to know if what one person sees and perceives from an image can differ from another. Like image if what I thought was blue actually looks like green to someone else, but we’ve both been taught to call that hue blue? The world could look entirely different to someone else, but we’ve been taught to associate certain words with images and colors, and so we’re all speaking the same language but seeing different things…

The real-world application for these types of studies I think most manifest themselves in the fashion industry in so far as consumer populations are living longer, and eyesight is one of the first human faculties to degrade. Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping delves into marketing considerations that will need to be made by brands who are attempting to capture the purchasing dollar of an aging society. For example, the ability to perceive yellow against a white background, or to perceive any text at all if the contrast between the text and the background is not great enough. These visual considerations, as well as basic considerations of text size on product labels, are very important to remember in both product design and marketing.

Definitions

Low-level vision: at the retina, including light adaptation and the center-surround receptive fields of ganglion cells

Mid-level vision: ill-defined region between low and high level vision. Thought to involve surfaces, contours, and grouping

High-level vision: includes cognitive processes that incorporate knowledge about objects, materials and scenes

Luminance: the amount of visible light that comes to the eye from a surface

Illuminance: the amount of light incident on a surface

Reflectance: the proportion of incident light that is reflected from a surface

Talking about color is like dancing about architecture

“Talking about love is like dancing about architecture” –Angelina Jolie in Playing by Heart. Trying to describe a feeling like love, is similar to trying to describe colors, because they are something seen, not written. How does one go about describing something like that? You’d need another language. Munsell points to the similar problem in music, for which a language of notes was created. Things you feel, see and hear, can be extremely difficult to describe with words and symbols not created for that exact purpose. As someone with a mathematician’s mind, I am in complete agreement, nay, love with Munsell’s discourse. The manner in which he has described the color sphere has brought into blissful clarity, a subject which, as he points out, has been a jumble of non-applicable language terms attempting to describe something for which they were not originally intend. Canary yellow? What if the canaries in another town are different from my canaries?! How can I order canary yellow fabric if they have different colored canaries!!!???

Munsell’s color sphere will be greatly beneficial to me within my design practice because it will allow me to explain colors which before would have been greatly subject to interpretation. By using his system to define hue, value and chroma, one can accurately convey the three principle characteristics of color. I consider this to be nothing short of revolutionary. It has clarified the differences for me between value and chroma, with which I was struggling to some extent. By imagining colors as something which can be explained within three dimensions, I will be able to communicate with precision that which is “not quite right” about a color. For example, if the canary yellow fabric is in fact too dark of a shade, and I imagined something lighter in value. Or perhaps it is too dull, and I would like something with a brighter chroma. By using value and chroma, the hue of yellow can much more aptly be defined.  

Cerulean Blue

Inspired by Miranda Priestly, The Devil Wears Prada:

“You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select... I don't know... that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... wasn't it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.” (imdb.com)

 

Cerulean Blue was discovered by Andreas Hopfner in 1805, and the pigment’s primary chemical ingredient is cobalt stannate. It was not readily available until 1860, when it was introduced in England by George Rowney (http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/indiv/history/ceruleanblue.html). Thereafter, it became the preferred pigment for artistic use in painting the sky, because it lacked greenish hues and it retained its color very well (Wikipedia.org). As the above quote indicates, it has gone on to become utilized in fashion as well. In 1999, Pale Cerulean was named the color of the New Millennium by Pantone (pantone.com), while a bright tone of cerulean can be found in Crayola crayons. Cerulean is found in nature, on birds including: the cerulean cuckoo-shrike, cerulean kingfisher, cerulean paradise-flycatcher, cerulean warbler, and cerulean-capped manakin. (Wikipedia.org)

 

Perhaps not a meaning to another “culture,” per say, but evidently in the video game world, Lords of Madness specifically, one can invoke the Cerulean Sign, waving their hand in the air, and leaving a glowing blue rune in the air, which becomes a pulse of cerulean light (http://dndtools.eu/spells/lords-of-madness--72/invoke-the-cerulean-sign--1539/). Interesting!

More on the pigment can be found at http://www.paintmaking.com/blue.htm:

“Cerulean Blue  PB 35 ASTM l
Chemical type and description
Inorganic synthetic mixed metal oxide. Oxides of cobalt and tin. A bright sky blue color of great permanence. invented in 1805 it was not introduced as an artist's color until 1870 due to its high cost. it is one of the most opaque colors on the palette. Very useful for the landscape artist. It is an excellent drier and makes a fairly flexible oil paint. Do not confuse with the cobalt chromate also marketed under the name Cerulean Blue but tends to be greener (it comes in beautiful turquoise versions) and a little darker. Its color index number is PB 36. While it shares many excellent properties the chromium version lacks the unique sky blue character of PB 35 although it does tend to be cheaper and has its own beauty.
Toxicity
Cobalt is considered toxic. Do not breath dust.
Media suitability
Linseed oil, Alkyd, Acrylic, Watercolor, Gouache, Tempera, Encaustic, Fresco.”

 

Photos within courtesy of Wikipedia.org.

Color stuff I've noticed...

So now that we've been talking about this color business, I've already been starting to take notice of stuff in my every day life. That's cray...

First, check out this awesome picture I saw on the Chive this morning!

Also, as I lay awake in the middle of the night last night, I noticed that my clock doesn't really bother my eyes too much, despite how dark it is, and my pupils are so big in the dark. And my guess, is that is because the numbers on the clock are red, the longest of the wavelengths of color! I could be wrong, but, that's what I was thinking...

Hello my name is...

Jacqueline Hastings.

This is a combination introduction post/show I know how to upload images. If, in fact, the above has successfully uploaded! I'm sure everyone will be reading loads of these intros over the next few days, so the most memorable thing about me is probably that I live in the Cayman Islands. I've been studying in the AAS Fashion Marketing Online program part-time since last Fall. During the day I work as an auditor of hedge funds, which I think is, probably needless to say, a fair bet less scintillating than fashion. Before Cayman, I lived in Boston, and my undergrad is from Holy Cross, outside of Boston. 

Looking forward to learning more about color!