Hot, Hot, Hot or Not, Not, Not

Welcome back to my ongoing series on the elements of design.  Today, I'm continuing to look at color - focusing on Color Temperature and Undertones.

Color Temperatures working around the color wheel

Sunny yellows, red hot, cool blue - every color has an associated Color Temperature.

Working around the color wheel, those in the red to yellow range are warm.  While the blues, greens and purples are generally regarded as cool colors.  Seems simple enough, right?

Well, it gets a little more complicated than that, unfortunately.

The Color Temperatures on the Cusps Fluctuate.

That's right - red-violet and yellow-green are sometimes warm and sometimes cool.  Because they're stuck halfway between the warm and cool colors, they don't really know which family they belong to and shift their apparent color temperature dramatically based upon who they're paired up with.

Just to be ornery, they'll tend to take the opposite Color Temperature from the majority.  Kind of like reverse camouflage.

So, if they're paired with warm colors - lots of reds, oranges and yellows, they'll seem cool.  Snuggled in with cool blues, greens and violets, they suddenly turn up warm.  

Check out the lime green beads in my samples at right - they're the same in both photographs.




Then there are Undertones.  Here's where we get into cool and warm hues of the same color family.   

Looking at the swatches, which red would you describe as warm? cool?

Varying the undertones can create Temperature differences even within the same color family, such as the red sampler above.   Brick Red is quite warm, with strong orange undertones, while Alizarin Crimson is a cool red with strong blue undertones.

This is one way to increase interest in monochromatic compositions.  Undertones can also explain why different hues of the same color simply don't seem to go together. 

This week, take a look at some of your bead stash and try to identify the undertones of the various hues - do they tend to be warm, cool or evenly mixed? 

Playing Hooky

Thanks to eveyone who sent me birthday wishes yesterday!  Joe and I played hooky for the day and had an absolutely great time playing tourists downtown. 

We even ran into a noon concert that made me feel like we'd stumbled upon the Central Park scene from the movie Enchanted!  The band, The Paperboys, is sort of a mix of Irish, big band, Mexican and folk music.   By the end of the concert, the space in front of the stage was full of people dancing (even me - if you can't dance in the street on your birthday, when can you?). 

Why Make This? Telling Your Story

Steph Cortes with her fantastic 'nerdy' crossstitch - Venn diagrams anyone?

Last week I attended a fantastic Etsy workshop with Steph Cortes of nerd JERK entitled "Balls Out Branding".  I'd dithered 'til the last moment, whether or not I'd sign up.  I am so glad I did.  It was a small workshop - just six of us, and Steph was a total riot.

I came away with two key points, presented in entirely new ways.  The first is the title of this post - "Why Make This?"  Steph pushed us to explore why, out of all the myriad things we could be doing, we are drawn to our particular art/craft forms.  And to tell the story of our work. 

Sounds so easy and in theory it can be so very hard.  Blogging's one thing - here it's really all about story.  But as soon as I head to my Etsy store to write listings, I start thinking about key words and how will people find me and what details about the product do they need to know.  All the dry, completely necessary, but often boring things.

It's easier in person, where you can sort of hash through ideas. I realized that conversation is in many ways like a first draft.  In most conversational instances, your words aren't expected to be picture perfect.  Instead, if you're like me, you sort of feel your way towards where you want to go.

So, Saturday morning found me sitting at the computer, looking at my Etsy listings and thinking about how I can add to them.  Except, great procrastinator that I am, I decided to go out hunting for other artists with story telling abilities and see how they did it.  A reconnaissance mission! 

I made a treasury to record my findings:

My very eclectic, story-telling treasury

As I searched and searched for stories, I became more and more open to what that could mean. 

With two of the items in my treasury, their photography tells the story. 

Emma Sommerfeld's collection of photographs for her Cherry Red Scarf is a study in simplicity and contrast.  Her model, a cross between Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood, wears a dark dress and stands in a winter forest.  All of the colors are shades of black, white or neutrals except for the scarf and the red lipstick. 

I absolutely cannot wear that color of red, yet she makes me want to buy this scarf because it's so beautiful and romantic.  Her shop's on vacation right now, but the links above should still work.

 On first glance, I thought that CamilleDesigns made crocheted doilies, reminding me of my grandmother Lela as she used doilies extensively in her decorating and I inherited many of them.  So of course I had to check it out. 

I discovered - she makes rugs!  Somehow I'd managed to miss the two bare feet at the bottom of the photo.   What a wonderfully clever way of showing the scale and immediately letting people know what they're looking at! 

Here, it was simply the title.  Where most of the listings from my search started with "Felted Slippers" or more detailed, "Felted Wool Slippers".  Here we have "like a sunrise on the ocean" - almost a little haiku.  Or the title of a painting.  I could wear a bit of vacation and art every single morning if I bought these!

Search engine optimization recommends including your search terms early, early in your listings.  But what if every once in a while I let poetry take precedence instead? 

With others, threads of story ran through multiple aspects of their Etsy presence.  Callie Mitchell's beaded bracelet tutorial, Garden Rows, is beautiful in it's own right.  The story of her inspiration for the piece made it even richer (told in one short paragraph). 

Her artist bio continued her story as well; far more engaging than a dry recitation of dates and awards.




Don't want to bore you, so just two more call outs.

Since she inspired this treasury, I wanted to include one of Steph's pieces and her comic, A Girl Can Dream, Right? was a perfect fit. 

I love how her listing starts with the story of the comic's origins, segues to the comic itself, then back to it's creation.  All in three short paragraphs.  Nice. 

I caught her at Geek Girl Con and made her sign a copy for me.  She even drew a little self-portrait!

And then the pièce de résistance.  If you only look at one listing, you have to check this one out simply because it's absolutely over the top.  Be sure to take a look at Jimmy McBride's artist profile - that's where it all comes together. 

His entire Etsy experience is internally consistent, even if it doesn't quite match the world as you and I know it. 






So, there were some of the examples I found.  Do you have any amazing examples of storytelling to share?  Ways of connecting the viewer to the artist or the art work?  I'd love to hear them!  :)

And like an extra scene after the credits at the movies, here's Steph's signature and self-portrait.  

Today's Vocubulary Words: Hue and Intensity

At different points in my life, I managed some fluency in both Spanish and Russian as well as maintaining some reasonable command of my native English.   Learning new languages always drives home two points for me:

1) Use it or loose it - if you stop practising a language, it becomes more and more difficult to use it with any fluency.

2) Our language frames and shapes our thoughts, and different languages make it easier to think about different things.

Which leads me to my theory - that if you have significant trouble working with color, it's likely because you've either never learned the particular vocabulary that would best allow you to analyze and interpret what you see, or that you simply haven't allowed yourself enough time to practice.  And that's really what this whole series is about; developing a working vocabulary.

Nine and a half different reds (acrylic paints)

Our vocabulary words for last week were Value and Contrast.  This week it's Hue and Intensity.

Hue refers to the specific name of a color.  For instance, the color red comes in many different hues.  A few common names include crimson, fire engine red, magenta, rose, brick red - I'm sure you can think of several more.  Each differs slightly from the other in one or more ways.


Intensity allows us to look at the relative clarity of a particular Hue in reference to its base primary color.  Primary colors are fully intense examples of their basic hues.  So, primary red is fully intense. 

In the print industry, Intensity is referred to as Saturation.

When we use adjectives such as bright, rich, dull or muted to describe a hue, what we are often trying to convey is its relative intensity (or lack thereoff). 


You can Alter the Intensity of a Hue without changing its Value in one of two ways:
1) Add in just a smidge of its complimentary color.   If you're working with red; add just a touch of green. 

2) Mix in a neutral grey of the same relative value.  Since the grey is the same value as your color, it will.

Working with paint (one of the easiest ways to play with color), I made some samples:

Playing with Intensity - Napthol Red & Cadmium Orange

Top row
* Left: painted a swatch of Napthol Crimson - relatively close to primary red.

* Middle: mixed my red with a drop of Sap Green, which is very close to the same value. This lowered the intensity slightly without changing the value much if at all.

* Right: mixed in a neutral grey (made from titanium white and ivory black).  Interestingly, my camera darkened the value of the least intense hue so that it is quite noticeably darker here in the photograph.

Less intense hues often appear darker than more intense jues to the naked eye - apparently my camera had the same issue.

Along the bottom row, I started with Cadmium Orange Light, mixed in a little Ultramarine Blue and then mixed in a neutral grey. 

To try and show the mixing in another way, take a look at this photocollage of my color mixing:

•  Top left: color photo of my mixing pallet - the camera did a better job of recording the values here.
•  Bottom left: the same photo converted to greyscale.
•  Top right: checking values through a green film (the green discards all red-based color information)
•  Bottom right: my Intensity worksheet converted to grey scale.

 So, my samples didn't turn out quite as well as I'd hoped, but we got to look at another vocabulary term:  Relative Value.  Which means that the apparent value of a Hue can be affected by its intensity. 

Red beads of varying intensities

Examples of high and low intensity compositions

And last, but not least, two samples again using some of my art work.  My cuff, Spanish Dancer, is bright and lively with a high intensity composition made almost entirely of pure, fully intense hues of each color.  Meanwhile, my Hunting Fae necklace has a more autumnal look with its range of much lower intensity hues.

Working on Freeform Peyote Kits

My first freeform peyote kit!

That's mostly what I've been doing this past week - working on kits for freeform peyote. 

I've put together three kits, only one of which is currently available in my Etsy Shop.  That's to make a bracelet similar to my Ocean Currents cuff. 








My Ocean Currents kits include ten different colors of seed beads shading from bright white to deep cobalt blue, 2 shades of drop beads, an assortment of accent beads, metal button, three different colors of beading thread, even two of my favorite beading needles.  The whole nine yards!

The idea is that it should have pretty much everything you need to dig in and get started.  So why haven't I listed the other two kits yet?  So far I've:

Hunted, sorted and rummaged through my stash of beads until I found the appropriate colors for each kit.

My postal scale comes in handy once again

Measured and weighed seed beads into little plastic baggies, feeling like quite the drug pusher.

Stitched up (and photographed the living daylights out of) a new freeform peyote Beaded Bead for my third kit.  This one's inspired by a friend; I'll tell you more about it next week.
 

Two of my kits with their respective inspiration bracelets

Packaged them up with pretty kit covers.  And tried to photograph everything. 

Then I thought, even if I do sell the kits with my book (which is one of the purchase options),  wouldn't it be nice to have some design notes pages for the project, similar to what I did for my Spanish Dancer bracelet in my book? 

So that's where I am now.  Working on design notes and trying to decide just how comprehensive they should be.  It's sort of like a hydra in that it seems to keep growing.  I check one item off my list and three more appear.  Today, I'll be working on those design notes again. I don't have much in the way of process photos for the two braclets, so I'm planning to create illustrations of key points instead. 

Between working on illustrations, editing photos, writing text, doing page layout and editing the whole shebang, I've decided to shoot for listing kits for my Peacock Spring bracelet kit and my new Freeform Peyote Beaded Bead next Friday.  Wish me luck!  I'm going to need it!  :)

Value and Contrast

color swatches arranged partially by value

Teasing apart the various elements of design so that we can look at each separately is difficult because they're all so closely intertwined.  Like a braided ficus, each is affected by the other.  This is particularly the case with value, color and contrast.  That said, I'm going to do my best to tease them apart and look at each separately.

So, what is value?  The best definition I've come up with is that value describes the quality(ies) of lightness or darkness in a particular object or composition.  When design folk talk about value, they use terms like "high" and "low" instead of light and dark.

High Value refers to very light values shading to white.

Low Value refers to very dark values shading to black.

Medium Values refer to (you guessed it) greys somewhere in the middle of the scale between light and dark.

To talk about how the different values in a composition work together we use the term Contrast.

If a piece is made up of a number of widely differing values it has High Contrast.  So, a piece made up of black and white, like a chessboard, has high contrast.  The greater the value differences, the greater the contrast, the more the individual values will stand out in a black & white photo.

If the values in a piece are all relatively close, then a piece is considered to have Low Contrast.  In Low Contrast compositions all of the values cluster in one section of the value scale - high, medium or low.  Pastels are a great example of a high value, low contrast composition.

Discarding color information makes it easier to look at value compositions.  Take a look at the two photo collages below and you'll see what I mean.

from top left: Winter Flame, Ocean Currents, Sea Life, Spanish Dancer

All of my compositions tend to hover in the mid-values, which is fairly common amongst modern bead and fiber artists oddly enough.  My Ocean Currents bracelet stretches the farthest into the high and low values, ranging from a deep cobalt blue to bright white.  My Sea Life pendant's not far behind.  But interestingly enough, my Winter Flame pendant shows far less value contrast along the outer edges than I might have expected.  I'll talk about the reason for that in next week's post. 

Why do we care about value?

1) Value contrast can help us to differentiate between the various elements in a composition.

2) Value can help direct your eye through a composition, as our eyes are drawn to lighter, brighter objects first. 

3) Value carries an emotional impact.   Take a look at the three abstract paintings below (from an original encaustic wax painting by Carol Trammel) - what is your initial, emotional response to each piece?  I've used an abstract to help remove contextual input.

high value, low contrast

mid value, mid constrast

low value, low contrast

All three are the same composition, but I adjusted their value levels.  What adjectives would you use to describe your reaction to each?

Now it's time to take a look at your own compositions.  Does your work tend to cluster around one segment of the value scale?  Which end?  Does your work tend to have high or low contrast?

Book Review & Design Thoughts

Kristen reviewed my book, Freeform Peyote Beading this past week for the popular blog Art Jewelry Elements.  I've followed Kristen's personal blog, My Bead Journey, for some time and have gotten to know her online.  While she's a seed beader extraordinaire, she started out firmly in the "no way" camp towards trying freeform herself.  I think I may slowly be tempting her to the wild side, but in the meantime, her review provides a very different look at my book, focusing largely on my discussion of color and design.









Which has had me thinking more about design.

Sketches - translating coral to a design

In my book, I look at a number of the elements of design that I use most often in my work, then briefly touch on the principles of design.  Early on, those two really confused me - what's the difference between elements and principles?  I finally figured it out like this:

Elements of Design are like tools or building blocks you use in constructing your design.  The design element's I use most include:

• Value
• Color
• Line
• Texture

Principles of Design are more like a set of architectural blueprints or plans.  They help you figure out how exactly everything goes together and include:

• Unity
• Rhythm
• Balance
• Proportion
• Opposition
• Variety

And since I'm thinking about them, I thought I'd launch a weekly series; every Monday for the next several weeks, I'll focus on one of these in turn and whatever I'm doing with them at the time.