Colorplay
In the colorplay, acting out your own death, knowing no more…
– Joy Division
In retrospect, picking the colors for my color palette were much harder than making the compositions. Yet deep down, I somehow knew it all had to begin with eigengrau, a phenomenon that has fascinated me for some time.
From there, I tried really hard to bring to mind the colors that mean something to me — either representative of my character or just because they really spark joy.
And finally we arrive at:
- LightGoldenRodYellow — A quirky color that is included in the limited set of HTML colors that are able to be referenced by name. I include it here because it’s a color I pull up a lot for a light, non-white shade. But in all honesty, I like this color because it has the longest name among all HTML color names.
- C0FFEE — It’s hexcode is
#C0FFEE. Two cups of love a day. - C0FFEE-PINK — C0FFEE’s complementary color according to the color wheel. It’s kind of the whole point this week!
- Machine-learned Red — An orangish-red, this color was machine-learned from the rest of the palette. A subtle reminder of our impending overlords.
- eigengrau — <3
- Gold Leaf — A material / color / texture that just really brings me a lot of joy. Especially the way it breathes when it reflects light. Did I mention you can eat it? #ediblegoldleaf
What follows is my first real composition. This was an attempt to be joyfully generative. Via Three.js, this piece randomly selects a standard-library shape for each color and mashes the meshes together with just enough calibration that each mesh can peek out of the others.
Next, we fall into patterns! Strongly guided by the golden ratio, this piece builds concentric circles that grow in size by 1.618. And while the details aren’t super clear in Instagram, I particularly love the layer of gold leaf that just adds a touch of joyous texture.
This piece is really a fuckup. While experimenting with duotones and tritones, this piece emerged. I chose to exhibit it here because it’s a great representation of the power of color. The first of the two images is a quick tritone using the subtler colors from my palette. It really strikes me how my feelings towards the photo change completely – bring to surface feelings of war, disappointment, anguish. So much so that the originally vibrant powders now remind of the smoke of warfare. For demonstration, the second photo is the original image from the Holi Festival with it’s natural vibrancy and fesitivity.
This last piece I call head-hurts.jpg. Toying around in photoshop, I decided to sandstorm the fuck out of my head and tie the colors back in by reinforcing the expansion from center. In composing it, I wanted to digitalize what I was feeling internally – exhaustion, turmoil, impostor syndrome. I hope they shine through here.