Colorjack - a Tool for Playing with Color by Gina DeLorenzi

Colorjack, a color resource for artists

Considering the cost of artistic materials, angst over making a mistake purchasing fabric or paints or other art expenses can lead to procrastination, loss of a great idea or ineffective artwork.

Sure, looking at magazines for appealing color combinations is one solution. But those glossy pictures are not my own creation and I have had no success translating magazine adverts to real art. I like Color Harmony by Hideaki Chijiiwa for musing over color choices.

Color Harmony: A Guide to Creative Color Combinations

It’s portable and can be taken shopping. And then there are professional programs available that can provide color mixing, but are expensive to buy.

Color Sphere on Colorjack

Colorjack is a website that has 3 tools to get instant color palettes. These tools are called Color Theory Visualizers. To use Color Galaxy, just let your cursor hover over any of the array of colored boxes and a palette appears. To use Color Sphere move your cursor around on a ball. Color Studio has you moving your cursor along bars. The colors chosen indicate their RGB (red,green,blue) values. Hue, saturation and value (HSV) codes are automatically generated.

Color Studio on Colorjack

For Photoshop enthusiasts, Colorjack has a link to a list of links for Photoshop tutorials plus several other color related websites.

For quilters who don’t want to be constrained by the fabric industry’s annual colorways in printed quilt fabric, Colorjack could help you delve into your stash and try some different color combinations using what you already have.

Artists working in oil or other media, dig out your half used paint tubes and enter what you have on hand into the software.

An unexpected color combination just might inspire that vague idea wandering in your dreams or sketchbook. Plus using up, recycling and rethinking our product stashes are always smart ideas.

Circus Quilt by Gina DeLorenzi, quilt artist

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Gina is a self taught quilt artist. She creates visual and emotional impressions in her fiber art by allowing a relationship between various fabrics to emerge. The stunning results of her dyeing and sewing techniques energize the direction each art work takes.

Gina is a regular contributor here on Fiber Focus. Click here to see her past posts.

"Gina's kaleidoscopic quilt collages are a focal point on walls in any setting." Ellen Ray Panero New York artist represented in the Guggeheim

“The colors are so vibrant, one’s eye is mesmerized.” Eva Birkner






www.quilts4u.com
modern interpretations of a traditional art form
www.contemporaryquiltart.org
your inspiration zone


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Colorjack - a Tool for Playing with Color by Gina DeLorenzi

Cube Grenades: Transforming Art Through Social Objects

by Gina DeLorenzi

What's a Cube Grenade?

You've seen some of the eye candy showing up in commercial advertising recently. Short, simple, effective, sometimes even profound.

The advertising world is moving to a new model for grabbing and keeping our attention. It is capitalizing on the concept of “social objects”. A social object is the centerpiece of any conversation. It doesn't matter what the object or idea is, simply that there's a connection going on between people centered on the object or idea.

The Mile Long Aids Memorial Quilt, A "Cube Grenade"

I don't think you can purposely manipulate social objects like the beer ads that try to make us buy their beer by associating good times with friends, BBQ's, tubs of beer and a lot of laughing. Social objects are spontaneous happenings. (It's the viral phenomenon of social networks.)

“Big social objects have more social gravity. They attract conversation like stars and big planets attract matter from space. Tiny social objects are more like a meteor shower; each one has very little gravitational pull as such, but when you add up all the tiny particles in space, they embody more total matter than the big constellations.” Juri Engelstrom, product manager at Google.

If the social object (idea) is a very good one, it could become a “cube grenade”. Cube grenade is the curiosity-arousing phrase created by cartoonist Hugh MacLeod. Cube grenades jump start conversations, they make us keep returning to an idea or object again and again, they motivate us to do something, go somewhere, they get us all excited about the new cool thing. McLeod says tube grenades stir up Trouble in the best sense of the word. A cube grenade can get left behind by a “conversation” that becomes so interesting that it eclipses the original social object. When such a transformation happens, people, ideas and actions can change the world, (for good or bad, sadly).

Cube Grenades as Art

"Allegria", Art Quilt by Gina DeLorenzi

I made my one and only art cube grenade about 6 years ago and I've have been resting on it ever since. Allegria is the best art quilt I have made. Allegria engages. It causes people to come back to it over and over. I could have sold several Allegrias, I still get requests for it. I think it will hold its own for many years even while quilt art trends come and go.

It's time for me to make another cube grenade with my fabric art. More of my art should be cube grenades. I should try to make every art quilt a cube grenade.

Human cubicles improving the world.

Make Your Own Cube Grenade!

Every human is his or her our own cubicle. Each of us can create a cube grenade with our talent and resources. When we create a cube grenade with our art, we “blow away the competition”. So, getting back to the title of this article, let's make cube grenades in our art and with our daily lives. The world sure needs improvement in all the basics. Whether we think Play it Forward, Random Acts of Kindness, or Cube Grenades, we need to get to work, right now.

"Evening Blossom", Art Quilt by Gina DeLorenzi

Gina is a self taught quilt artist. She creates visual and emotional impressions in her fiber art by allowing a relationship between various fabrics to emerge. The stunning results of her dyeing and sewing techniques energize the direction each art work takes.

Gina is a regular contributor here on Fiber Focus. Click here to see her past posts.


www.quilts4u.com
modern interpretations of a traditional art form
www.contemporaryquiltart.org
your inspiration zone

Cube Grenades: Transforming Art Through Social Objects

The Importance of Seeing Color for the Fiber Artist by Gina

Trembling Diamonds Quilt by Gina

Shades of Gray - What do you see?

Most of us learned our colors when we were 2 or 3 years old. By school age, some of us were diagnosed with some degree of color blindness, a deficiency in perceiving value, tints and low saturation in color, brown and purple being particularly a problem area. For some people who are color blind, they only see shades which we call "value".

When I first began making art quilts using my hand dyed fabrics, I enjoyed creating the effects of luminosity and illusion. I dyed a lot of grays and 8 step color gradations. I combined these solid shades with batiks because of the subtlety of tonal range of batiks plus the fact that a batik often has a mixture of light and deep value within one color palette.

I discovered a website, x-rite, that has three color tests to try. The three spectrums of color were what to me seemed to be rather murky and complex shades. I began to wonder if I had a color deficiency in one area of the light spectrum. It took me about 8 minutes to take the test, and the results were computed immediately.

Since I spend a lot of time and resources dyeing fabric for my art, I was glad to see that my test results were very close to what is “the norm”. I had been a little concerned after seeing 2 of my art pieces in black and white photos and thinking how different the shading effects were in the absence of color. These two art quilts were made with low saturation batiks and grays.

You would be helping other fiber artists if you reported back any surprising results after taking the test, and I for one would be interested in hearing any feedback you have.

Color vision is a blessing we take for granted. Did you know mice are completely color blind? Genetic scientists are experimenting with gene substitution in mice with some remarkable success. These scientists hold out hope that color blindness may one day be reversible.

Lateral Fault by Gina Delorenzi

Guest Post by Gina DeLorenzi

Gina is a self taught fiber artist. She has developed a traditional craft in unique ways. Color and simple shapes drive the quilt making process. Using her own hand dyed fabrics, she combines traditional techniques and patterns in bright and vivid contemporary expressions.
www.contemporaryquiltart.org
www.quilts4u.com

The Importance of Seeing Color for the Fiber Artist by Gina

Misconceptions About how Search Engines Find Your Website and What To Do About Them

Search engines are a very competitive environment so how they work is a well guarded secret. Google in particular is so sophisticated and successful that it represents over 80% of all searches, leaving the impression with many that there's a giant elephant in the room.


Six Point Engine Tune Up
1. Get rid of hidden text or hidden links.
2. Flush out cloaking or sneaky redirects.
3. Cut out lines of automated queries to Google.
4. Rout out multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
5. Loosen and remove "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
6. Extremely Important: Rev down (don't overuse) keywords.

Focus on the needs of your users and provide unique and relevant content that influences them to visit your site first.

Here are the basics that you need to know:

* Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.
* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
* Good website design will prevent web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" linking to your site without your knowledge. (Your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.) Don't be lured by businesses that promise overnight improved visibility, for a price no less.


If you want to improve your website's performance here is a simple set of guidelines for you to follow:

Start with the basics:

1. Have a well structured website .
2. Include a sitemap and register your site. Many people don't know what a sitemap is, or how it is used by Search Engines, let alone how to construct one.
3. If you use Gmail you can get free access to Google's webmaster tools to help you with these processes.
4. In order to stand out your website has to offer information that is useful and rich. There are no short cuts to quality content. It is also the only way to maintain your user's interest beyond the first experience that results from a search, and hopefully return another day.
5. Your information needs to be relevant.

How is relevancy determined? This is a very important question.
Here is Google's explanation:

"Google processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content."

A final bit of advice, be patient. It will take time for you to develop a valued website. It will also take time for your website to become recognized as a valuable website.

Gina
your inspiration zone
www.contemporaryquiltart.org


Gina is a self taught fiber artist. She has developed a traditional craft in unique ways. Color and simple shapes drive the quilt making process. Using her own hand dyed fabrics, she combines traditional techniques and patterns in bright and vivid contemporary expressions.

"New York Beauty", $550
Gina's Quilts are also available on 1,000 Markets.

Misconceptions About how Search Engines Find Your Website and What To Do About Them