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COLORS � PIGMENTS � PAINTS

ÁGNES KULIN

PAINTER,

ART TEACHER / EDUCATOR

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Content:

  • How we see colors? Short color theory.
  • The colors of the digital world. The Computers palette - the displayed and printed colors
  • Color perception
  • Color palettes and paint making. Palette portraits - artists subjective palettes
  • The world of pigments and paints ( a brief walk through of the history of paints and their use and place in art history)
  • Lack of color. Color as distraction
  • Modern Pigments (thermochromic pigments, pigment wars)

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What is COLOR?

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What is COLOR?

  • Sunlight is an example of full spectrum light: it contains all the wavelengths (all the colors of light) blended together. We see this as white light. Humans perceive color of objects and the environment because those objects absorb certain wavelengths of light while reflecting others.

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Color wheel �

Primary – Secondary- Tertiary -

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Test your eye. �Are you colorblind? �Ishihara color plate test, from 1917 – it consists 35 plates

  • What is the number in the middle of the circle?

  • What is the color of the number?

  • Do you even see a number ?

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Color blindness

Protanopia

red color blindness;

Deuteranopia

green color blindness;

Tritanopia

blue color blindness.

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The colors of the digital world.�The Computers palette - the displayed and printed colors �

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Pixel(Pic-El) = Picture + element

Low resulation-low pixel count/PPI

High resulation- high pixel count / PPI

PPI: Pixels per inch 

DPI: Dots per inch

A pixel is simply a square box, each pixel has three component

RedGreen, and Blue.

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Halftone dots – Raster points�

  • Reprography"reproprinting„,  the reproduction of graphics through mechanical or electrical means, such as photography or xerography.

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  • Three examples of modern color halftoning with CMYK separations. From the combined halftones pattern and finally how the human eye would observe the combined halftone pattern from a sufficient distance.

CMYK

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LPI- Line per inch during printing

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RASTER image, also called a bitmap image is an image comprised of a rectangular grid of pixels. The smaller the pixel size, the higher the resolution. An image with a resolution of 300 ppi has  300 pixels per square inch.

Common raster file types include: .png .jpg .jpeg .gif .tif .psd

VECTOR image or graphic is a type of image defined on a plane, connected by lines and curves. They form shapes based on precise mathematical equations. Because of this if you zoom in or out the lines, curves or points always remain smooth.

Common vector file types include: .eps .ai .pdf .svg .sketch

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Color perception

  • Let’s play a game with our color perception.

These colors are not as they seem…

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Is there any difference between the two ocher rectangles in the middle?

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Is there any difference between the red and green „flowers”?

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Is there any difference between the red and green „flowers”?

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Is there any difference between the small grey rectangles?

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What is the difference between the two X’s in the grey and yellow squaers?

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What is the color of the central rectangel?

A- it is one saturated grey

B - it has an oposite gradient to the backgroung rectangel, from ligh to dark grey

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Pigments

  • Natural – minerals, plant or animal based
  • SyntheticChemically produced

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Prehistoric paints

  • Ochers: red and yellow, Chalk-lime white, charcole black

Altamira cave – 14 000 year old paintings, discoverd in 1880,

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Cueva de Las Manos- The cave of the hands�(Argentina, Patagonia)��13 000 - 9 000 �years ago

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Prehistoric paint making techniques are still in use to this day in northwest Africa. Namibias semi nomadic HIMBA tribe, and their red ocher paint- Otjize

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Paint making

  • Pigment + binder = paint

Encaustica, Watercolor , tempera , oil color, acryl

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Jan van Eyck- The Arnolfini portrait

The originater of oil paint?

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Colors of the antique world

The phenomenon of the Apelles palette; which turned into the Zorn palette in the 19’th century, after swedish painter Alexander Zorn (using modern synthetic pigments-Vermilion, Titan, Ivory, Ochre)

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Apelles Painting Campaspe (Alexander the Great's mistress)

Francesco Trevisani 

(Italian, 1656-1746)

A favorite subject at that time

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Mumy portraits - the walley of Faiyum ( 1-3 , 4. c BC,)

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Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669)

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Palette Portraits

  • Portrait of the palette of Nemere Réka
  • Portrait of the palette of János Kósa

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Nemere Réka in her studio

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Kósa János in his studio�

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In discussion with my master’s palettes

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The colorful world of pigments and paints

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Egyptian Blue- First synthetic pigment

Pigment- calcium copper silicate

4 000 year old pigment

Nefretiti’s headpiece is painted with this color

It was the most used pigment for blue paint, until lapis lazuli came into the picture

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The King of the BLUES – Lapis Lazuli

Main source of this mineral can be found in Afghanistan

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In the early renaissance 13’th century it was called- Fra Angelico blue, because he used it in his Madonna paintings a lot.

Artist

Year

1433–1435

Medium

Tempera on wood

Dimensions

147 cm × 91 cm (58 in × 36 in

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Modern use of ultramarin, �The first copyrighted color- Yves Klein blue

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Yves Klein: Antropometric prints 1960

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The deadliest Green-�Schweinfurt/Emerald/Vienna/ Paris/Veronese green

First used in 1814, and it was banned in 1960

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The silent killer in georgian kids bedrooms - their wallpaper

�Georg Friedrich Kersting

Woman Embroidering, 1811�47.2 x 37.4 cm, Oil on canvas

By 1830, wallpaper production had risen to 1 million rolls a year in the UK, and by 30 million in 1870.

Tests later revealed that four out of five wallpapers contained arsenic. 

Experiments at the end of the 19th century proved that arsenic pigments in damp or rotting wallpaper were lethal. The mold that grew on damp wallpaper emitted a toxic odor that smelled of garlic.

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George Seurat:�A Sunday on la Grande Latte, 1884�

Lovers of emerald green in art:

Cezanne and Seurat

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Carmin, Mayan red/Spanish red �Cochineal pigment form insects

Only the female can be used for pigment making- one on the left

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Indian worker collecting, cochineal

Cochineal farm nowadays

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Caput Mortuum – Dead head pigment

Legends about its origin:

It was first made in egypt, by using mummy bandages and corpses?

The pigments molecules under microscope looks like skulls ?

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Memento mori, vanitas�

Philippe de Champaigne's,

Vanitas – Life, Death, Time

(1671) 

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What is the real color of old masterpieces?

To renovate , or not to renovate

To restore , or not to restore

How to renovate, how to restore

These are the questions.

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The controversial restoration of the Sistine Chapel

Michalangelo’s works on the chapel:

The ceiling- 1508-1512

The last judgement -1548

Restoration between 1984-1994

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Before restoration

After restoration

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A composite image of The Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve

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Daniel before and after restoration

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The Last Judgement / Comparison before and after restoration

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Color = distraction

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INK - Japanese artisan calligraphy ink.�

Egrets from Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing, Hokusai, 1823

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SEPIA - A fancy word for brown ink

  • Not VEGAN- the main ingredient is the ink from Cuttlefish

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The color of �Antique roman �ruins

Hubert Robert �1733-1808

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Grisalle

  • Grisaille comes from the French word for grey: “gris.”It’s an  under painting technique.
  • A technique to learn the values of light and shadow, and to prepare for a colored work.

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Ingres- The grand Odalisk

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Picasso- Guernica,1937

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WHY DO WE STILL MAKE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY

  • The first color photograph made by the three-color method suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, taken in 1861 by Thomas Sutton. The subject is a colored ribbon, usually described as a tartan ribbon.

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Hommage to Edward Weston

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André Kertész

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Shadows series

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Melancholic tulip

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André Kertész

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Modern Paints and pigments and their use in Fine art

A 1950-s radium clock, exposed to ultraviolet light to increase glow luminescence

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Olafur Eliasson- Green river project 1998�

Stockholm 1998-

The power in the change of color

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For this monochromatic intervention, Olafur and his assistant used Uranine, a non-toxic, water-soluble dye, to test ocean currents. Eliasson started this project in 1996 when he was living in the studio, looking at a river.

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Recycled and reclaimed eco paint. From industrial pollution and rust to oil paints

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Thermochromatic paints

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Szabó Klára Petra- Untitled-2012

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PIGMENT WARS Anish Kapoor VS Stuart Semple

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  • The first Vantablack, which Surrey NanoSystems introduced at the Farnborough Air Show in 2014, used a chemical deposition process that laid down the nanotubes, all sticking upward on their ends like blades of grass—a billion of them in a square centimeter. The pigent absorbs 99.96 % of the light that is why it’s called the blackest black.

  • Surrey decided to work with Kapoor. “His life’s work had revolved around light reflection and voids,” Jensen says. “Because we didn’t have the bandwidth to work with more than one—we’re an engineering company—we decided Anish would be perfect.”

They signed a contract. Kapoor got exclusive rights to use Vantablack in art.

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Anish Kapoor has inclusive rights to using vanta black (the balckest black)

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Chicago: „Cloud gate” Bean-2006

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Stuart Semple

“I’m going to release my pink, but not allow Anish Kapoor to use it.”

By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this paint will not make its way into that hands of Anish Kapoor.

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Thank You