Color

After 15 weeks of color. I'm official sick of it. This class was good and I learned a fair amount but I'm also really excited to be done. We learned color interactions and aspects of color, and it was good. It was good, but I'm glad it's done.

Selective Color

Through out our days we encounter numerous uses of selective color some being highly effective and others not. The use of selective color is highly evident in package design and advertising. This is smart because it grabs your attention and draws the viewer in, if it is not done correctly though, it could be passed by without even the thought of as second glance.

This image correctly uses the process of selective color. The red flower shape in the lower left hand corner draws your eyes into the piece and the almost completely blank canvas only accentuates the color red.

Another good example is the ipod ad. The green attracts your attention and draws you in. The white of the ipod and headphones lead the viewers eyes across the page, original ipods were also originally white, so these ads sold the product at the same time.

It is hard to find bad use of selective color, but it is out there, just keep looking.

Color Blind?

When you look at this circle what number do you see? If you don't see a 6 then you are color blind. People with color blindness generally have trouble seeing reds, greens, blues, or a mixture of the of the three. Most commonly is seeing red and green as the same color. 1 in 12 men and 1 in 20 women are born with color blindness, most often caused by genetics and usually present at birth.

Color blindness is caused by mutations of the X chromosome, leading males to be more likely to receive it, they only have one X chromosome and women have 2. There are many forms of color blindness, including some that are temporary (caused by migraines) and also having color blindness only in part of ones view.

Before doing any research I had no idea how many people were actually effected by color blindness and it leads to an interesting part about art. Graphic Designers, while color plays a large part of what they do, they cant solely rely on it. If you are trying to reach as broad an audience as possible you need to be conscious of of the colors you are using. You cant make a point by just having contrasting color, because it may not reach as broad of an audience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness
http://www.colormatters.com/v_colorblind.html

Spring Is In The Air

In a week it will officially be spring. With spring comes a re-birthing of sorts. Associated with this re-birthing is a bright array of colors. Pinks, purples, and yellows all vibrant and surrounding us on a daily basis. Whether natural or artificial these colors will be surrounding us for the next several weeks.
Now closely associated to Easter, the pastoral colors are ones associated with happiness. From painting eggs to freshly blooming flowers and everything in between, these pastels are important to our moods. After long winters and cold days, humans need something to lift there spirits, and what better way than color association. These pastels are invigorating and refreshing, going hand in hand with the sense of re-birth that occurs every March.
Peoples wardrobes change. A lot of winter clothes are boring and bulky, out of necessity. Spring clothes are colorful and sometimes barely there. For many people these colors are more than simply a color palette, they are a light at the end of a cold tunnel. Growing up we've always seen these pastoral colors associated with warmth and the beauty just before hot summers. Every year they reemerge to give us hope of the coming warmth and seemingly better days.

Color (again!)

The color yellow is splendid. Its vibrant and invigorating. Noticable and bright. It is everywhere in our lives and constantly seen. The oldest known usage of the color yellow is in the poem Beowulf. Its compliment is purple. Several animals have the color yellow in their names. It is used as many terms, including yellow journalism and racial slurs.

I enjoy the color yellow greatly. My bike is yellow. I have many sweatshirts and other articles of clothing that are yellow. Its a happy color that makes me smile when i see it. Bananas are delicious, they are yellow as well. A study done by the University of Chicago stated that yellow is the easiest color seen from a distance, thus leading to the paitning of taxis, a tradition to this day. School buses are also yellow, so they can be seen, occuring in less accidents keepng are kids safe. In sports a yellow flag or card is given in the event of a penalty.

Coldplay sung about the color yellow in a song. the leader of bike races wears a yellow jersey, a tradition started by the Tour de France. Pencils are traditionally yellow. The planet Saturn has a yelow color to it. Stop ligths have yellow as a warning of a red light. In some aspects of our lives, yellow is a good happy color and in other parts of our lives it is a warning. The color yellow is fantastic.

the relevance of color

I am a Photo major, so while most peoples lives revolve around color and there affect on different attributes, a lot of my time is spent studying a lack of color. My days revolve around find a perfect black and a perfect white and every shade of perfect gray in between, and I'm sure some people would ask why? While virbrant colors and shades might get a graphgic design major excited, to me, they are just cumbersome and wasteful. Why use all those unnnecessary colors when you can express such deeper emotion without ever having to use more than 2 colors.

And this leads me to the point of, what affect does color really have in our lives? If a graphic designer had to work solely in black and white he may be confused and stumble for direction not knowing where to go or how to express his message clearly, menawhile someone like Ansel Adams may have done the same if presented with the oppourtunity of color photography. These greatly varying impacts on both lines of work are what keeps the arts so interesting.

Black and white photography has this vintage feel to, that keep a lot of photographers sticking with it. The tones and varying levels evoke emotion and display great depth, while color photographs can accomplish this too, black and white has been doing it for so long, that many ask why stray? Meanwhile graphic designers flourish in the area of an abundance of color because it makes their jobs easier. When a client says I really want this fact to be stated, all the designer has to do is put it in a bright or contrasting color, something that wouldn't be as easy in black and white.

The usefullness of color differs greatly based on your profession and the aruguemnt for and against it will be argued til the end of time.

ketchup

How much of our lives is completely connected to color? How many objects that we see on a daily basis do we just assume are always going to be a certain color? This question was answered for us, sometime in 2000, with the introduction of green ketchup. While to most people over the age of the eight, this seems like a ridiculous idea, it may have been one of the best marketing ideas of the past decade.

"Today's kids are exposed to lots of vibrant colors and animation, and they expect these same experiences at the dinner table," said Gene Grabowski, spokesperson for the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

With kids being the number one consumers of ketchup, why not market it toward them? Once news of the new ketchup color spread, Heinz got requests for pre release samples, from families, schools, and churches.

To many, ketchup is red, it always has been and we thought it always would be. But it was brilliant to introduce a new color to things. What Heinz thought they would sell in a year they ended up shipping out in the first ninety days. To kids, it doesnt matter if it's green, red, or purple; it still tasted like ketchup and on top of it all its fun. so while many thought green ketchup may be a bad idea, at first it was one of the greatest marketing ideas of all time.
While I couldn't find why or for what reasons, I did find that Heinz discontinued the production of colored ketchups in January of 2006. Maybe ketchup is supposed to be red after all.
"It's Easy Being Green" http://pittsburgh.about.com/library/weekly/aa101700a.htm 13 February, 2008

Color

Marketing has been and always will be a part of our lives When most people think marketing, they think of advertisements and thats about it, but it goes much deeper, including choices of colors. People dont normally think about it, because it's such a sub-conscious activity. About the only situation where a consumer consciously thinks about the color of their purchase is when buying a car or clothes, and with clothes the color may not even matter, the image may purely be enough of a catalyst for purchase. When we were asked to enter the grocery store and find the implications of colors, a few of us were confused at first because it was something we had never even thought about. After a few short minutes in the store I quickly realized everything is thought about ahead of time.
The bottles of sunny-D were made orange for a reason. The name alone evokes thoughts of warmth and brightness, so what better packaging than an almost neon color, that is bright enough to attract children's attention and enough of a warm feeling for parents to approve as it seems natural and healthy. There isn't a dull part to this bottle. The label, type, jug, and even the cap are all vibrant colors, who wouldn't be attracted to it?
The label on the tide bottle reads Pure Essentials, what other color would they possibly make the container? Any color other than white would evoke a feeling of being stained or tarnished. Who would honestly buy a container of tide that read Pure Essentials but was in a blue or black jug, very few people. In our minds the word pure and clean are associated with the color white, because white is the easiest color to see stains or dirt on.
All these things are sub-conscious and very few people go through their day wondering how much thought advertisers have put into the colors of different items and wondering who advertising campaigns are targeted towards. Like my high school english teacher once told me "Everything is done for a reason" and I didn't believe her until after completing this activity.

Performance Art Part 4

Jordan Swartz
Performance Art Activity

One of the two peoples stands with their hands between their legs, while the other partner just holds their hands straight out, the two participants join hands. On the count of three, the partner with their hands between their legs jumps and throws their legs over while at the same time the other partner pull up forcefully. This makes the one partner completely flip.
In order to complete my activity, the partners need complete trust and must work off of each other. I'm really glad the people I chose were able to complete the task, they even did it more than once.

Conceptual Art

I liked the activity we did in class. I find it interesting how many different pieces could be created from just eight original 2x3 drawings. If there weren't the cross hairs pieces the overall work would look rather cohesive. I find it interesting that Sol LeWitt can send out these detailed instructions to various companies and institutions and all these works will be original Sol LeWitt pieces because he is the original creator and are all based off his works. All the drawings are based off of his originals so these works are his originals, which I find very interesting.

Performance Art Part 3

I participated in Britney's activity. Fran and I walked five steps apart and either threw, bounced, or rolled a tennis ball, but the same action could not be repeated more than twice in a row. We could move in different directions, towards each other, closer, farther apart, or opposite directions; the person with the ball being the one who decided. I found it an interesting and fun activity. The first few passes and movements were easy, but after the fourth or fifth pass, you had to begin to think what direction to move. You didn't want to continuously move in the same direction, causing a static state. I believe Fran and I completed the task well though. We varied between throwing, bouncing, and rolling and kept our movements varied as well.
I really enjoyed Casey's activity. For her performance art, she had two people repeatedly draw the star of David. The star could be altered as long as it was still the star of David; the participants could color it in, stretch it, shrink it, distort it, anything to alter its state as long it stayed some what true to the original shape. I found this activity to be extremely interesting. I'm fascinated by the power of symbols and this project only helped fuel that. The star of David was altered in multiple ways yet it still resembled the original. I love how something can me changed in multiple ways to express different meanings and evoke a wide range of feelings, while at its core is just a simple image. I'm glad she chose this activity because I think it is an extremely good performance piece in that it really makes people think in some form or another. While every ones pieces made the participants think and react, I think Casey's was good because it related back to one of the simplest forms of art.

Performance Art Part 2

The Fluxus group was a group of artists, composers, and designers who mixed mediums and medias through out the 1960s. They created kits called Fluxus boxes which contained "scripts" or outlines of how to perform various "do it yourself" art activities. These activities were meant to blur the lines between performer and audience. Most of what they did was to mock or upset high culture.
I really like their work, in that it was created to attack high culture, something i approve of. I also like that they wanted audience members and performers to be one in the same, I believe to many people think of art as some out of reach unattainable form, but art is whatever you want it to be. I like that the Fluxus group made that evident.

Performance Art Part 1

I performed Allan Kaprow's shaking hands activity with my roommate. It was interesting because it was a little awkward. Usually with a handshake it lasts at most a few seconds if not less, but with this project we continuously shook and while I don't know exactly how long it took for the activity to be accomplished, it was definitely longer than a normal handshake. I rather enjoyed this activity because I tend to really enjoy awkward situations. Most awkward situations really aren't that bad, it's just that our entire lives we've been taught that these situations are out of the ordinary, so thats how we perceive them.

Logos

http://thecontentwrangler.com/images/uploads/mcdonalds.JPG October 18 2007
This logo is one of the most recognizable logos used around the world. Logos are just streamlined descriptions of a company or corporation simply reduced to the most basic of terms. they are created so people can comprehend them with in a matter of seconds. They fuel our ignorance and help sell products.

The Large Glass

I really enjopyed "The Large Glass" by Marcel Duchamp. There was such a back story and so much of his life and thought went into it and I really wish all art was that completely thought out and intense. The top of this piece fascinates me. The three oddly shaped squares inside the cloud like object, shatter lines streaking across the the frame. It all works together to form something gloomy and drastic while also being beautiful. The intense effort, thought, and work that went into this piece baffles me. I wish I could create pieces that had this much information behind them and required this much thought. I wish someone would recreate this in real life. It would be a really interesting thing to see in person how it all worked and flowed. The fact that it shattered and he had to piece it back together makes it that more interesting and kind of goes with the theme and title of the work, in that things can fall apart at any time but if you want, you can fix it.

Pattern

Floor tiles and fabric prints tend to be similar in style. They vary in degree of intricacy and design but they it seems if you can have a pattern in a fabric print you can with a floor tile and vice versa. For fabric prints it seems to depend on the material for the detail of the pattern. While with tiles it seems to depend on size, the bigger the tile the more detailed they can be. Islamic architecture seems to be very detailed and intricate, but done in extremely large portions, encompassing streets, walkways, and buildings. Tiles are more self contained if only because of their size, while fabrics are able to be more open and unrestrained because of their size. I like the fabric patterns a lot because they are free flowing and seem to be more interesting. Islamic architecture is also very interesting because it is so detailed and also so vast.

Gestalt

http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredo/ArtAndScienceOfDepiction/links.html

Value

Creating the value scale is a lot harder than it would seem. I tend to write with intensity and usually press fairly hard, so getting the high values were kind of tough. It was also hard making sure the entire region was evenly shaded and there was no internal variations. Keeping each section as its own separate identity was tough, all i wanted to do was shade them together. I've done value scales before but I've always separated sections so that made it easier. Doing the drawing was a lot easier because we were able to do it in parts. There was a required number of values but they didn't have to be in any certain order or arrangement, which made the creation of the drawing a lot easier.

The string activity was definitely an interesting project and also an enjoyable one. Unraveling and wrapping the string was a mindless activity while the re wrapping and untangling was a thinking process. I hastily unraveled my string through out the room; not thinking about composition, placement, or having to clean it up at all. I think this is true of me i tend to do things rashly and not completely thought out. Then the cleaning up process was arduous and time consuming. At one point i was even cleaning up the wrong string and helped someone else early. I feel this is very true of who I am. I tend to pay for my rash actions and i end of put others peoples feeling over my own.

I also liked the line and shape project that we drew. It was interesting to see how each person did different designs and different compositions. I really liked this project because it made you think differently and out of box; I had to figure out a way to arrange the subjects so as to fit the page but also meet all the criteria.

Which of the images a, b, c, or d are lines?
a, b, & d
Which of the images a, b, c, or d are shapes?
a, b, c, & d
What makes a line?
It doesnt necessarily have end end point, it can go on forever.
What makes a shape?
A confined area or piece.