Anne Devries

More colours distilled from real life: ‘Eye Candy’ by Anne Devries.

Fashion plates

This blog does exactly what we did in class this week… rendering photos down into a limited palette of swatches. Using photos from the fashion blog The Sartorialist is a great way to predict trends in colour.

Split-complementary

Endangered Species Wrapping Paper, 2004 by Lauren E. Adams uses a split-complementary combination of red-orange, blue and green.

Analogous one-act plays

This book cover makes use of an analogous colour scheme—five colours in all, but nevertheless all taken from side by side on the colour wheel: yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, and blue.

The Apple Computer Dictionary defines analogous as “comparable in certain respects, typically in a way that makes clearer the nature of the things compared.” In this sense then, using an analogous colour scheme for a book of plays that all share a common trait—being one act long—has some significance.

Discordant: Templeton

A much more pleasing use of a discordant colour combination is found on the menus at the Templeton. Actually, these colours are somewhat similar to the light blue and dark orange used on the jPod cover flap (though jPod uses more of a yellow-orange). The stripes play with the eyes, and can look like they’re moving or vibrating when you try to focus on them, but they’re just there as a fun background and don’t interfere with the communication of any of the information.

Discordant: jPod

I can’t think of a worse use for a discordant colour combination than to set the lighter colour as text against the darker coloured background, rendering the copy virtually unreadable, short of squinting and straining the eyes about an inch from the page. This seems like the kind of annoying trick that Douglas Coupland would enjoy playing on his readers, especially if one is to believe the characterization of himself in his own story.

To quote the front flap: “Full of word games, visual jokes and sideways jabs, this book throws a sharp, pointed lawn dart into the heart of contemporary life.”

Contrast

A beautiful photo by Tina Tyrell, who photographed the previously mentioned monochromatic fashion series for New York Magazine. I love how the shadow that forms a triangle in the top right corner is a complementary violet to the yellow wood detail that it overlaps. All the colours of the spectrum are in this photo—red seat, orange figure on the book, yellow hair and wood, green plant, blue shirt, violet shadow—yet they exist in harmony and don’t compete for attention. The star of the photo is the brilliant light itself, and its stark contrast against the shadows it casts—areas completely void of colour.

Juicy colour

A photo of the juice I was drinking today at work. I totally did not expect this colour to come out of the green and yellow tetrapak. It looked quite beautiful under the fluorescent lighting. The picture doesn’t really do it justice.

Monotonous fashion

An article from New York Magazine about people who allegedly only wear one colour.

Photos by Tina Tyrell.

Docker’s Grill’s tertiary tableware

I like the colour scheme of the plates at Docker’s Grill, almost as much as I like their cheap breakfasts.

Note the similarities to the top three colours in the palette below, from when I mixed the tertiary colours for my colour wheel. I have yet to cut these out and place them on the wheel, as I really like how the six of them look together in this juxtaposition.

Home Depot: the colour depot

The Home Depot has an extensive and irresistible collection of vibrant publications on colour combinations in their painting section.

They have four different booklets on yellow of varying chromas, with characteristics applied to them: mellow & comforting, clean & playful, soft & elegant, deep & luxurious.

Other pamphlets show the difference between mixing a colour with warm complements, cool complements, and tone-on-tone combinations of the same hue. According to these booklets, a palette accented with warm complements “gives a subtle and sophisticated look.” Accenting with cool complementary colours will “give you vibrant, crisp accents and exciting highlights.” A palette that blends lighter and darker tones of the same colour is “simple to work with and comfortable to live with.”

Adventures in food colouring

What follows is a photo-documentary of my attempt to make black icing the colour of my cat’s fur for a cake.

The actual result was not black, but a cold, dark violet, which, against the white and chocolate icing, and in tungsten lighting, could still trick the eye into seeing black. I mixed almost all of the red, blue and green colouring into the vanilla icing, but only added a touch of yellow, seeing that it did nothing to darken the mixture.

The final result: Unfortunately, I ended up using most of the colouring, which thinned the consistency and produced runny icing, that could only be contained by an outline of the thicker white.

Colour therapy

The recent MindBodySoul supplement of the Georgia Straight featured an article about colour therapy. It looks like they took some cues from the story on the cover—just a glance at that warm red backdrop sends a surge of endorphins to clear away the winter blues.

The therapist interviewed claims “the most uplifting hues are violet, magenta, gold, and white—the fastest-frequency colours at the infrared end of the spectrum.”

The article closes with a “prescription for winter and spring in Vancouver: reds, peaches, and rose hues. Wear reds, magentas, burgundies, and scarlet near achy joints. Buy long red socks, for rheumatic knees.”

Is it true what they say about the green ones?

My candy-coated chocolate research led me here:

http://www.mms.com/us/coloroflove/

Why have they chosen green as the “colour of love?” Because it is the most unlikely colour to be associated with it? Green: nature, the environment, health—the colour of hospital walls and spinach. Of course, spinach made Popeye a pretty sexy dude.

This website asks and answers, “What’s the mystique of green?”—”It’s been a rumored love potion since the beginning of time.” Is that so? Wikipedia will tell us the truth:

Culturally, green has broad and sometimes contradictory meanings. In some cultures, green symbolizes hope and growth, while in others, it is associated with death, sickness, or the devil. The most common associations, however, are found in its ties to nature. Green is associated with regeneration, fertility and rebirth. Recent political groups have taken on the color as symbol of environmental protection and social justice, and consider themselves part of the green movement, some naming themselves green parties. This has led to similar campaigns in advertising, as companies have sold green, or environmentally friendly, products.

. . . further reading brings us to this one sentence here, under the ‘Western’ heading amidst several contradictory associations: “Stories of the medieval period further portray it as representing love and the base, natural desires of man.” [Goldhurst, William. "The Green and the Gold: The Major Theme of Gawain and the Green Knight." College English. 20.2 (Nov 1958) pp. 61-65 doi:10.2307/372161]

So there is a grain of truth embedded in the M&Ms mythology. But I think what we really have here is a great marketing gimmick, especially on Valentines Day, that will set M&Ms apart from all the other candies and chocolates. By using the colour green, the opposite—the complementary colour of the traditional heart-coloured hue, M&Ms are unconventional, daring and unique. If complementary colours make each other “pop,” then marketing green as love puts M&Ms centre-stage, offset by the holiday’s sea of red wrappers, gift cards and roses.

Other interesting Wikipedia notes on green:

• In high schools in the United States during the 1960s, it was widely believed that if someone wore green on Thursdays, it meant that they were homosexual.^[35]
• Many Asian languages have no word distinguishing blue from green, though recently published dictionaries do make the distinction.^[38]
• The Libyan flag is completely green, in honor of Islam’s veneration of the color.
• In the Celtic tradition, green was avoided in clothing for its superstitious association with misfortune and death.^[31][32]
• Green is thought to be an unlucky color in British and British-derived cultures,^[33] where green cars, wedding dresses, and theater costumes are all the objects of superstition.^[34]

This girl would disagree with the last point:

Reeses Pieces: That ’70s colour

With all the candy coated colours available, why are Reese’s Pieces just orange, yellow and brown?

These are the colours of the 1970s. I grew up in a house that was built in the ’70s, complete with orange and brown carpets. This was the colour scheme of my dad’s old sweaters, the decor in Niagara College (est. 1967) and the seating in older TTC Subway cars in Toronto (the newer ones are red and blue, incidentally, two of the colours ascribed to the city in the Walrus article). What year did Reese’s Pieces first hit the market? 1978.

Other associations with this colour combination include: nature and farming (as in, soil, hay, prairie sunsets . . . lending a natural, homegrown ethos to its subjects), autumn leaves in the countryside, and speaking of fall, Halloween—a perfect colour scheme, in fact, to match a candy-giving holiday.

Reese’s Pieces are a different flavour from their cousins Smarties and M&Ms on the inside, yet they share similar outer characteristics—so they need something that will visually set them apart. I suppose if you were to sample colours from the above photo, you would come up with yellows, browns and oranges—and no greens, blues, reds or violets. Reese’s Pieces are, basically, the colour of peanuts.

Vancouver is yellow.

There is a wonderful two-page spread in this month’s Walrus magazine wherein Todd Falkowsky explores the signature colours of Canadian cities–colours that seem to identify uniquely with specific urban landscapes. The artist pulled the predominant colours from piles of photographs taken in each of the cities. Hence Toronto is shaded by the blues of its street signs and reds of its transit system; Whitehorse (pictured above) identifies with the glowing green of the Aurora Borealis, Yellowknife a blue-white shade of snow.

Here is a link to the online version of the article:

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2008.02-detail-todd-falkowsky-revealing-urban-colours/

Falkowsky left out Vancouver. If I were to choose Vancouver’s colours, off the top of my head, three colours stand out: slate grey mountains, blue grey ocean, evergreen Stanley Park. Is it really so dark and dismal here? Yes, actually. Or so it’s easy to believe in the thick of winter. More come to mind–overcast grey rainclouds, cool grey raindrops.

But it’s really not all so dull. For the sake of trying to add a little warmth to the picture, there is also:

Davie Street’s Bubblegum bus stop benches. Red, green and yellow dragons of the Chinese New Year parade. The incandescent glow of Trout Lake’s Illuminares Festival. The proud rainbows of Vancouver’s vibrant gay community.

And yellow: The giant lemony sulphur pile. Granville Island’s cadmium-coloured Bridges Restaurant. The golden rays of an English Bay sunset.