Color Theory: What’s the deal with the palettes I’m using?

Following a recent conversation, I wanted to write this blog to add some final pieces of context to my current interest in color palettes.

Binary Numbers

The Binary Numbers project was changed earlier this year following Trump’s inauguration. The original was inspired by simple musings on Data as Art. It was updated again in 2014 after the work had stalled due to technical reasons. I increased the complexity of the images, and incorporated Heritage Color Palettes.

But the end of last year and the beginning of this were exhausting. Two months were spent in protest:

But it seems that this alone was not able to tear the wheels off a tanker in Tienanmen Square… and so I decided on something uplifting. For myself, and for the viewer.

Cinema Palettes was a fantastic Twitter account that takes a scene (not necessarily iconic) from a film and analyses the scene’s colors, presenting back to us, the palette used.

I had been following it for a while and I became curious as to what I might be able to do with it in the configuration of my Binary Numbers.

And so from January this year I adapted the Cinema Palettes concept into this work starting with 50 new color palettes.

The new images are probably a little brighter than the heritage ones; the colors do seem to be a little more saturated. As you might expect for the big-screen.

The change to the project worked well for cinema lovers. I could highlight the best newly-generated images as well as reference the film the original colors came from.

What really interested me is whether, looking at the image out-of-context, it would be possible to derive the film, or even the scene? Could the new abstraction still be in some small way, a recreation of that cinematography? Could it evoke a sense of what that movie is? or the director’s style?

I’ll leave that up to the reader to decide.

The complete set of images is no longer online (publishing was stopped when Twitter was rebranded as X and everything that came with that) and is in the process of being re-housed. Parts are available in Internet Archive Snippets. Here is a small highlights reel under a special Hash Tag in Twitter.

The Painter Goblin

We’ve discussed the Painter Goblin a lot recently. There are a number of facets to this work around serendipitous engagement with collections, creative commons, and so on. It also continues this work with palettes.

At the time of writing I have compiled 37 palettes to be used by The Painter Goblin. Only two are linked back to the Cinema Palettes as they did not work as well with the larger format images being produced.

In my first blog on The Painter Goblin I describe the Zine and my interest with pseudo color. In a later blog I try and expand on this a little more.

Originally I was driven by the aesthetics of the output from the bot. In running the project and developing it further my interest has come back around to the idea of mirroring a style, or sense of feeling evoked by an original source image. This has manifested itself more so as I find new ideas and implement those.

New places new palettes

A small tour of Canada and the US earlier in the year helped me to think about what new palettes could look like.

New output from the Painter Goblin

Some the image results using the new palettes can be found below. I’ve deliberately chosen these for their sense of parody and humor. The Kokoni ‘print-test’ / Westminster Abbey comparison is my favorite realization of parody so far, transforming the Gothic wooden architecture of the building into a quasi-future vision.

Where to see more

Anyone interested in seeing more, just follow The Painter Goblin on Twitter. Let me know what you think there, or on this blog. Can you figure out where the original palette inspirations came from? What are your thoughts on the newly generated image?

What palettes would you like to see?

Color palettes are a really fun thing to work on. What palettes would you like to see? If you have an idea just let me or the Painter Goblin know on social media or in the comments below!

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3 thoughts on “Color Theory: What’s the deal with the palettes I’m using?”

  1. Pingback: Infinite Blue @BrooklynMuseum – Ross Spencer :: exponentialdecay [-dot-] co [-dot-] uk :: Blog
  2. Pingback: The Painter Goblin: Part 4, Putting it all together…
  3. Pingback: The Painter Goblin: Becoming Corporeal - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres :: blog

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