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Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

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PROCESSING: CREATIVE CODING AND COMPUTATIONAL ART<br />

402<br />

Not everyone seems to be able to see these often subtle color relationships. Squinting or<br />

crossing your eyes, turning an image upside down, or changing your viewing distance to an<br />

image are techniques that can sometimes help you to better see these phenomena. I’ve<br />

had very bright, talented students really struggle when it came to seeing <strong>and</strong> mixing color,<br />

while other students seem to take to it very naturally. It’s led me to believe that, just as<br />

some people can more naturally distinguish subtle modulations in pitch (I’m not one of<br />

them), there is a similar mechanism for perceiving <strong>and</strong> differentiating color. However, I<br />

feel it’s also important to point out that great art has been created by both strong <strong>and</strong><br />

weak colorists. Some artists/art professors even believe that innate gifts, such as color sensitivity<br />

or drawing facility, can even at times impede a person’s development as an artist.<br />

So if you can’t see the color shift in the example, try not to freak out.<br />

Color has three distinctive properties: hue, value, <strong>and</strong> chromatic intensity. Hue relates to<br />

the actual names we associate colors with (red, green, blue, etc.). Hue is controlled by the<br />

wavelength of the light. For example, the hue of a ripe lemon is yellow, while the hue of a<br />

stop sign is red. An object absorbs all the colors in the visual spectrum (light) except the<br />

color we perceive reflected back to our eyes. Thus, a red object absorbs all the colors<br />

except red.<br />

Value relates to the brightness vs. darkness of the color. Value is also strongly determined<br />

by light. Although it is possible to shift the hue of a color, as in the last example, it can only<br />

be shifted so far in the physical world. However, the value of a color has less constancy.<br />

The value of the color on an orange’s surface is drastically different in a dark room than<br />

outside in the sun. Value often confuses people when first learning about color. When<br />

looking at an object, they tend to see what they know about an object—which is usually<br />

primarily defined by the hue. For example, if I create a still life <strong>and</strong> place an egg in shadow<br />

next to an eggplant under a light source, most beginning art students will assume the egg<br />

surface has greater value than the eggplant, as they associate white with brightness <strong>and</strong><br />

the eggplant’s dark purple as darkness. Under the same exact lighting conditions, an eggplant<br />

would be darker than an egg, so the gestalt function in our mind codes a predictable<br />

pattern, which usually holds true, until some sneaky art professor sticks an eggplant under<br />

a bright lamp.<br />

The last component of color is chromatic intensity. Two colors can have similar hue <strong>and</strong><br />

value, but very different chromatic intensities. Consider the difference in color between a<br />

brick <strong>and</strong> an orange. The hue in both is orangish, <strong>and</strong> the value could be very similar, but<br />

there is still a difference in the color, which is controlled by chromatic intensity. When a<br />

color loses some of its chromatic intensity, we speak of it getting neutralized or moving<br />

toward gray. In the artist’s color wheel, which we’ll look at next, certain colors have a complimentary<br />

relationship. When two complimentary colors mix, they neutralize each other,<br />

reducing the chromatic intensity of each. Before you look at the color wheel, I want to<br />

make sure you underst<strong>and</strong> the syntax in these two lines of code:<br />

color swatch = color(100, 100, 120);<br />

fill(swatch);<br />

color is a <strong>Processing</strong> data type. The function call color(100, 100, 120) returns a color<br />

value, which I assigned to the variable swatch, declared of the type color. The three arguments<br />

I passed to the color function represent the red, green, <strong>and</strong> blue components of

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