AuthorTopic: Apple Thief (experimenting with colors)  (Read 2893 times)

Offline Tourist

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Apple Thief (experimenting with colors)

on: February 02, 2011, 01:52:08 am
A couple of experiments in colors.  The art is not a finished work, but complete enough to ponder the techniques, I think.



Instead of a color ramp, I tried a color wedge.  Started with a triangle, with corners marked light, dark, and saturation.  Used three different hues, and blended.  The result is a set of colors that can be sliced in several different ways and the whole set remains harmonious.  I think this approach has promise. 

There are still some limitations:
* The short ramps make AA is difficult
* Integrating different wedges into a whole
* Separating light/dark/saturation prevents colors that are both dark and saturated, or both light and saturated.




This is a dithering experiment.  A set of 8 grays dithered with a set of hues + saturation.  Expanded the previous image to 2x and changed each 2x pixel into a 50/50 dither gray scale and hue.  The box shapes could be smoothed.  Also, the color set really needs a brown.

This came from trying to use colored pencils on graph paper to make some offline pixel art.  That didn't work out so well, so I wondered what would happen with dithering.  I can't say I like the results, but maybe someone can find it useful, even as an example of what doesn't really work.


Tourist

Offline michelcote

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Re: Apple Thief (experimenting with colors)

Reply #1 on: February 02, 2011, 03:27:03 am
This is a very interesting idea.  Can I ask what method/process you used to blend your three colours?  Trying to tinker with my own palette and looking at yours in Photoshop right now, one thing I can already notice is that the brightness imbalance is quite severe.  Another thing, the whole palette is 27 colours (including the flesh tones).  Maybe squeezing down the triangle?

Offline Tourist

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Re: Apple Thief (experimenting with colors)

Reply #2 on: February 02, 2011, 05:56:37 am
The figure isn't using all of the colors in the triangle + skin tone ramp.  It's only using 21 + bg if you ignore the placeholder green at the unfinished parts.  But you're right, it tends to push using more colors rather than color consolidation. 

At the current size, most of the individual ramps in the triangle are 3-5 colors long.  Which seems like it should be the right size.  Would a smaller triangle be too small?  Maybe a different arrangement than triangle would work better?  Or using a larger triangle to start from and step every other color or every 3rd color as needed?  Maybe a smaller triangle and a better choice of colors?  I'm not sure where to go from here.

Color choice.  I could write a lot here, but so very much of it is an arbitrary choice.  The short version, is that I ramped hue on an RYB wheel rather than Lab or RGB, and ramped lightness and chroma on Luv.

There is no good standard for the RYB blue or the secondaries, so I used these:


And the wedges end up looking like this:


The corners (marked light hue and dark hue) are about 14-15% max chroma and lightness of 85-90 and 12-15, depending on hue.  The saturated color is reduced to 90% max chroma for the leftmost step of the triangle.

The triangle in the original post used green, yellow, and blue as the corners.  Green and yellow are light to begin with, and the RYB blue (rgb = 0,70,255) is a mid-tone blue rather than the darker blue255.  Hopefully that explains the brightness imbalance?  I don't have photoshop, could you elaborate on the imbalance you see?  I also used these hues for the rainbow of colors in the second image, you can judge how balanced they are (or are not).

Really, the colors are guesswork and unsupported choices.  Pure RGB or Lab space would probably get results that work fine if you wanted to try this approach.  I welcome any feedback on this.

Tourist
« Last Edit: February 02, 2011, 06:01:51 am by Tourist »