Analyze colors of paintings you like
I’ve always liked the colors I chose for the painting “The Club”. I chose them intuitively, by trial and error, and mixed the acrylics on the fly. Having recently discovered the color analysis tool in Gimp, I thought I’d analyze my own painting to see what it was I liked about the painting. The analysis was a bit of a surprise.
I thought the background was a shade of green, but in fact was a desaturated yellow. Thus, 80% of the painting was made up of yellow or orange hues, with some variation in intensity and value. Intensity is how much of the hue is in the mix, and value is how dark/light. A dark value with no intensity is black. A light value with no intensity is white. Maximum intensity is the most intense color, whether it is light or dark depends upon the hue. This creates a triangular description of the hues that is well represented by the Gimp color tool.
The blue-green in the lower left of the painting turned out to be 1/3 of the way around the color wheel from the dominant color in the painting. This is a common approach to color selection in web site design. The dark half desaturated value of the blue green also proved some contrast with the brighter orange.
Note how the tool allows for easy selection of thirds. The orange color plot shows that upper left is a blue green at the point of the triangle. 
The blue-green plot shows the variety of colors available for that hue. The most intense color would have too much of a neon feel for what I wanted in this painting.
Understanding what worked can greatly help plan and try new things in your color palette. Gimp is a great tool to assist in this. And another reason to use Linux.
- the MuseTags: Linux
December 7th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Gimp is indeed a great freeware program but as for it being a reason to use Linux? Gimp also runs under Windows. Run Linux for Linux sake if you like.