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Pre-Paintings 101
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Magical backgrounds are created before the painting is conceived!

Colorful spring flowers were today’s topic, but enthusiasm got sidetracked. I’m really excited about “underpaintings” or “pre-paintings.” Not equal to real flowers, but colorful, organic, and beautiful like flowers. And a satisfying triumph for those of us who are intimidated by blank white surfaces or the “how shall I paint the background” dilemma.

Underpaintings work for watercolors, acrylics, and probably can be adapted for oils and other media. Exciting underpainting techniques I’ve tried thus far include: tissue pours, wax paper and plastic wrap pours, batik, charcoal powder washes, and mono-prints. And I hear that my favorite painting instructor, Susan Cowan, has more up her sleeves. I will convey any you are interested in.

Pre-paintings, or underpaintings, can set the mood for imagery to come, or can become finished abstract paintings themselves. And since the painting may not yet be in mind, pre-painting is pure play with colors!

L. to R.: Laying down crushed dress-pattern tissue over a wet paint pour, to be removed when nearly dry.
“Mozambique” background was a facial tissue pour. “Michael & Loki” I think I pulled the tissue when the paint was a bit wet.

Six Steps to do “a tissue paper pour” pre-painting:
  • Gather a few sheet of facial tissue — use 1-ply (or take 2-ply and hand separate it to 1-ply). Old dress-pattern tissue can be used, or gift tissue, feel free to be creative.
  • Tear each tissue sheet into a few irregular shaped pieces and crinkle them.
  • Mix up three to five of your favorite colors of paint (acrylics, watercolors, or maybe oils) in little paper cups or small containers — thin them to the consistency of cream.
  • Pour the colors here and there onto your paper or canvas.
  • Lay the crinkled tissue, strewn here and there over the poured paint colors. Then allow it to ALMOST dry. This takes some time... Less patient people use a hairdryer, but I prefer sun if I can find any here in the Pacific NW. Peek under a tissue corner to see if it is still wet. The paint should be dry enough to hold it’s shape, but very slightly damp in order to pull the tissue off — if it is too dry the tissue will not come off (which adds interesting texture, but not what we’re going after here).
  • When the paint is nearly dry, gently pull off the tissue, to discover amazing crinkle patterns and colors!
 
St. Patricks Day & The Color Green
Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Rock of Cashel in Ireland — thanks to Lismacue Visualize trees, grass, ferns, and new Spring growth. Verdant nature is topmost in the imagery for the color green. Green connotations are fresh and soothing, like: renewal, regeneration, and relaxation. “Green” is also a buzzword for protecting our environment, standing out for nature conservancy and ecological preservation. More meanings and symbolism for green are found at About2.com and Squidoo.com.

Vast green hillsides of Ireland — the Emerald Isle — and shamrocks acclaim St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. Ireland’s patron saint reputedly used the three-leafed shamrock as an illustration of the holy Trinity. Early observations of the day included good works performed to honor St. Patrick. The celebration spread throughout the world, ranging from the Catholic feast day to activities honoring Irish culture, as well as high-spirited shenanigans. Many St. Patrick’s Day activities worldwide are listed on wikipedia. In the US, parades became a feature of the day. In Chicago, 40 gallons of green vegetable dye change the color of the Chicago River for a few hours, an annual tradition since 1961. Savannah, GA, dyes its water fountains green. In New London, Wisconsin, leprechauns change the town's name to New Dublin the week of St. Patrick’s Day.

I have a goodly chunk of Irish ancestry and our baby daughter arrived with an Irish complexion and fine red hair that goes well with it’s complement on the color wheel: Green.
 
The Holi: Festival of Colors
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Here’s something we’d like to see in our community! Greet Springtime with hope and joy and a frolic with colors for young and for old.

The festival of Colors is a celebration of Spring and the triumph of good over evil, by people in India and other countries with large Hindu populations, as well as other religions. Inhibitions are dropped as people playfully chase each other, splashing paint, tossing colorful powder and spraying colored water on one another. We found these fun photos at Boston.com.

The celebration begins with bonfires honoring the victory of good over evil, on the eve of the full moon falling in late February or March. Next day, the Festival of Colors — or “playing holi” — begins with merry-making that can continue for three to sixteen days depending on the region. In 2010, the burning of the bonfires is on Sunday February 28 and playing Holi begins Monday March 1.
 
Sketches from around the world
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Sketchpad has been taking off these past few days. Mugtug.com had over 85,000 visitors on Monday, and 75,000 Tuesday. The traffic started pouring in when someone posted the project to Hacker News. From there Reddit picked up the story in two threads Technology and Programming.

Here’re are some images drawn by our users — they’re much more talented than us! The images were drawn-by [left-to-right respectively]: Turbo, ???, RufusReinright, and wadejohnston1962.
 
Sketchpad (beta)
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Sketchpad is a free application utilizing <canvas> to allow anyone with a web-connection and a recent copy of Safari, Firefox, Opera, or Chrome the ability to create beautiful drawings. Internet Explorer support is coming soon — we’ll be tying into IECanvas (look for this release sometime next week).

Sketchpad includes a number of Drawing Tools — including: Text, Shape, Spirograph, Brush, Calligraphy, Pencil, Paint-Bucket, and Stamp. These tools can be used together with the provided database of Colors, Gradients, and Patterns — or you can create you own custom styles by clicking on the “COLOR”, “GRADIENT”, or “PATTERN” tabs on the top-bar. Sketchpad also includes a few generic Drawing Utilities — including: Marquee, Crop, Eraser, and a HSL/RGBA Color-Picker. Be sure to click on “LIGHT” mode on the top-bar for extra fun :)

Feel free to add your Sketchpad drawings to our Flickr group, we’d love to see them!

Here are a few drawing made with Sketchpad:
 
Sketchpad (alpha)
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Welcome to the preview of Sketchpad. Though not all browsers support <canvas> we’re working hard to extend support before our official release. Until then, you lucky FireFox users (download Firefox) will be able to kick the tires and hold the wheel of what we believe will become the new standard in Web-authoring.

Sketchpad uses the little-known <canvas> tag to provide users and publishers with full control over the presentational qualities of their work. Directly accessing vector graphics, the <canvas> tag gives publishers real-access to their users’ display. The <canvas> tag will be available in HTML 5.0. In the meantime, we’re working to extend support to Internet Explorer, and working on compatibilty with Safari/WebKit’s javascript layers.

In the late 90’s, Macromedia released flash 7.0, using Actionscript. This allowed web developers to incorporate advanced graphics and programming into their website. Unfortunately, flash files are difficult to edit and require browser-side plugins. This proprietary format has never-the-less, received wide acclaim and usage over the years. Canvas is something new. With canvas, programming is handled in plain Javascript. Developers and users are given a simple way to manage their interactive programs. Further, canvas is a simple vector programming interface. Whether you’re using a mobile phone or a wide screen display, your Canvas webpages are guarenteed to be crisp, clear and responsive.

NOTE: This was the original release annoucement, however, this post was never published… The production halted from March 2008 until October 2009.
 
Color Galaxy (beta)
Monday, April 21, 2008
Color Galaxy is a online color library visualizer. We’ve amassed a collection of 27 color databases. There is a lot of variety in the data, everything from Crayola’s historical set of standard crayons, to Munsell’s scientific renotational data. Requires a <canvas> enabled browser: Firefox, Opera, or Safari.

Here’s a list of what’s included: CNE, Crayola Crayons (since 1903), NBS/ISCC (Dye Colors, Colour Terminology in Biology, Centroids of the NBS/ISCC catalog, Colors for Ready-Mixed Paints, Horticultural Colour Charts, Dictionary of Color, Plochere Color System, Color Standards and Color Nomenclature, Rock-Color Chart, Postage-Stamp Color Names, Soil Color Charts, Standard Color Card of America), Resene (2001 & 2007 catalog’s from Resene paint company), Munsell 1929 (Colors physically appearing in the 1929 Munsell Book of Color), Munsell 1943 (Colors listed the original 1943 renotation article, lying inside the Macadam limits), Standards (Named colors in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape, SVG, Windows, & X11), Tango Color Palette & finally the VisiBone Anglo-Centric Color Code. Special thanks to Robert Krimen, MCSL, Jaffer, and Wikipedia for providing the data for this project!
 
DHTML Color Picker v2.0
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Today, we have a few new updates for you. First off, the Color Conversion Library has been expanded to include HEX, RGB, HSV, CMYK, XYZ, Lab color spaces. On the same note, I’d like to introduce the DHTML Color Picker v2.0 — another Open Source product (GPL & CC) by the ColorJack crew. This color picker was developed for one of our upcoming products: an online vector editing package.
 
Articles on Color Theory
Thursday, August 23, 2007
An articles section has been added to the website. This area will be devoted to providing interesting, easy to read, information on color theory. There are currently three articles available: Color Blindness, Color Formulas, and Color Models. These initial articles help describe what’s going on in our color scheming applications. Have an idea for an article? Feel free to contact me.
 
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