For those who are not familiar with Bruce MacEvoy’s Handprint website, this guy knows more about color theory than almost anyone who has ever lived. Not the world’s best organized site…. Start here: https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html
I spent about six months working on adding new pigments to my palette, and his research was invaluable. Highly recommended for anyone who is intermediate at watercolour. For beginners, he has a page that recommends some beginner palettes, which is quite useful.
For those looking − as the GP said, it's not fantastically organized − pigments information is available here: https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/waterfs.html. Top links yield access to pigments, organized by "color family".
Two other similar resources on pigments − always good to check what's in the tube before buying!
We did some statistical analysis on the golden ratio and its use in art. It does indeed seem that artists gravitate away from regular geometry such as squares, thirds etc and towards recursive geometry such as the golden ratio and the root 2 rectangle. Most of our research was on old master paintings, so it might be argued that this was learned behavior, however one of our experiments seems to show that this preference is also present in those without any knowledge of such prescribed geometries.
Golden ratio is very specific, whereas any proportional that is vaguely close to 1.5 (equivalently, 2:1) gets called out as an example of golden ratio.
The same tendency exists among wannabe-mathematician art critics who see a spiral and label it a logarithmic spiral or a Fibonacci spiral.
Certainly some art critics and artists over-apply and over-think so-called 'golden' geometry. What I think is happening is very simple... that artists avoid regularity (e.g. two lights of the same color and intensity, exact center placement, exact placement at thirds, corner placement, two regions at the same angle, two hue spreads of equal sides on opposite sides of the RYB hue wheel etc etc). These loose 'rules' of avoidance can be confused with 'rules' of prescription such as color harmony, golden section etc.
One advantage of using hello as a greeting is that it is agnostic of social rank. This made it the perfect choice for greeting people of unknown social rank on the phone.
Having traveled the world quite a bit I can attest to the ubiquity of the word hello… almost everywhere I go it is understood. ‘OK’ has a similar ubiquity, and it is interesting that both words are relatively new additions to the English (universal?) language.
These are called translingual words. 2 interesting ones are coffee and chocolate. basically no matter where you are in the world, people will understand those (with slight regional differences like "cafe", similar to hello)
Chocolate is native to the Americas and started to spread around the world in the 17th century, so it makes sense that most languages use the same word, as it is a quite recent addition.
Chili peppers, tomatos, and potatos (among others) are all from the Americas, but have their own names in every area they've spread to, or have taken the name of something else. Why is chocolate different?
I used to demonstrate PS1 in my digital painting class. I would show that without a layer-based system it was still possible to create a composite using calculations feature. The process is incredibly simple… an alpha, a foreground and a background plus some addition and multiplication. Even art students understand it. I’m still blown away by how much functionality they managed to squeeze into an executable small encounter to email to someone.
FYI.., the version I used was registered to Apple. Apparently, the Knoll brothers demoed PS to apple and they promptly shared it amongst themselves and their buddies. Almost all illegitimate copies of it are derived from that pirated copy.
Fun fact… John knolls wife was the founding member of the Photoshop ‘Widows’ club… a home to people who have lost loved ones to software.
That is certainly how oil painters paint. But painting on absorbent stone is likely very different - more akin to fresco, and would probably not support a very layered approach.
I used to teach in a UK university and encountered many American students on exchange. It was almost their standard policy to claim disability when something did not go their way.
> a good understanding of color theory is also necessary.
Agreed. I would also speak out again the uninformed use of pre-configured color combinations. As someone who teaches art/design these are the bane of my life… students use them as a replacement for color theory. A designer should at least know how to parse a color into its hue, saturation and lightness components. Most everything else should follow naturally.
To these fine tips I would add: ‘test on as many devices as you are reasonably able’. Something can look fine on your laptop but lousy on the platform for which you are aiming to disseminate.
This also applies to webdev. I develop a lot with the chrome devtools but once stuff is in mobile it doesn't quite work out due to people using different browsers. The browser bar sometimes being on top or on the bottom hiding controls... I started to just center stuff in mobile ignoring like 20% of space in top and the bottom.
this is something web and mobile devs can skip a lot of times it seems these days. testing on only the best screens or most recent device simulators and they leave their work looking like a mess across screens because its optimized for something specific rather than checking or being responsive
> "[...] I would add: ‘test on as many devices as you are reasonably able’."
Testing on a reasonable amount of different screens (and software-based filters etc.) is excellent advice for too many people forget this. Of course that's also always a money, time or motivation (goal) question...
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