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

View featured Quilter of the Month, Suzan Engler
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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

Vintage Victorian Stereograph Cards on Rayela Art

Veiled Arab Woman Stereocard, Late 1800's

A local antique store here in Kentucky recently had a moving sale and I found a bunch of interesting stereo cards. For those of you who are not familiar with them, these cards were popular in the late 1800's and early 1900's until movies replaced them. The card has two images which, when viewed through a stereograph, becomes a 3d image.

"The Eskimo at Home" Stereogram

Conexion has a wonderful article on the history of the stereograph, from which I took the following excerpt:

"Between the 1840s and the 1920s, stereographs served as an important method of entertainment, education, and virtual travel—predecessors to contemporary forms of media such as television and movies. As Burke Long argues, “Mass-produced and relatively cheap, the integrated system of mechanical viewer and photographs became fashionable for classroom pedagogy, tourist mementos, and parlor travel to exotic places of the world” (90).

People viewed stereographs at homes, schools, and churches, gazing at images documenting almost every subject imaginable from
astronomy to zoology. According to stereograph collector and historian William Darrah, stereographs were used to teach millions of American children about geography, natural history, and a range of other subejcts (50). Many in the nineteenth century embraced photography as a medium that, unlike other arts such as painting, presented the “truth” through exact rendering of a scene.

Stereographs seemed even more real and more engaging by simulating three dimensions. Oliver Wendell Holmes called stereographs “sun sculptures” and commented, “All pictures in which perspective and light and shade are properly managed, have more or less the effect of solidity; but by this instrument that effect is so heightened as to produce an appearance of reality which cheats the senses with its seeming truth” (16)."

Hindu Fakirs, India, Antique Stereogram

I've always liked these images and look through them whenever I am in stores which carry them. Rarely do I find anything that I would seriously want to keep. But, these images interested me as they recorded ethnographic information regarding dress and lifestyle of a time gone by. I am always curious to see what kind of language was also used back then, especially regarding people from other countries or native Americans. The example below is of particular importance as it describes the Philippine villagers as insurgents:

Vintage Victorian Stereograph Card- Philippines, 1899 ''Insurgent Families''

Stereograph cards used many different types of viewers, but the most common were hand-held devices, similar to the one pictured below:

Victorian Stereoscope

Stereoscopes and stereo cards have made a recent come-back. The photo above comes from a do-it-yourself tutorial by Dick Oakes on 3-d photography and there are plenty of other resources online.

Visit my Etsy store to see the cards and view more detailed information. I think they would look great framed!

Vintage Victorian Stereograph Cards on Rayela Art

A Man on the Street: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

219 E. Martin Luther King Boulevard, Los Angeles, 2006.

Photo: Camilo José Vergara

A little deviation from fiber art here... I found this interesting slide show on the New York Times and thought it was worth sharing. Photographer Camilo José Vergara has been photographing urban landscapes for a couple of decades. In this series, he documents murals that include images of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Several of the murals were in Los Angeles in obvious Latino neighborhoods, interesting as historically Blacks and Latinos have experienced tension with each other, especially in situations where they competed for the same jobs. I taught ESL in a Mexican neighborhood for awhile, over 20 years ago. I drove by a large mural on the side of a Church every time I went down to the class. That mural had Dr. Martin Luther King Jr as a central figure, along with Gandhi and a couple of other peace makers. Wish I had taken a photo...

The class sought to address some of these issues as the residents of Little Village lived next to a Black neighborhood and there was great animosity between both. I'll never forget how one of my students, a gentle Mexican man in his 50's thanked me at the end of our 10 week session. He worked in a factory and had been at a machine, next to a Black man for years and they never said a word to each other. Because of the class, he decided to start greeting him and the two became friendly, even helping each other when their machines acted up. We have come a long way in 2o years, yet much work remains to be done. That work can start with a greeting...

North Warwick Avenue at West North Avenue, Baltimore, 2001.
Photo: Camilo José Vergara

Artist's Statement:

"In America’s poorest ghettos, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s portrait is one of the most popular subjects of public art. These images, which I have been documenting since 1977, regularly appear on the walls of the liquor stores, auto-repair shops, fast-food restaurants, mom-and-pop stores and public housing projects of Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and many other cities across the country. The majority are the work of amateur artists. Though Dr. King is usually front and center, he is often accompanied by other inspirational figures: Nelson Mandela, John Paul II, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa, Pancho Villa. He is often accompanied by his famous phrase, “I have a dream” – a reminder that in many of the communities where these murals exist, the gulf between hope and reality remains far too wide."

- Camilo José Vergara

Visit the slide show to see all of the photos!

A Man on the Street: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Hello, World! Best National Geographic Photos of 2008

These photos are going around on an e-mail, so some of you may have seen them. But, they are so beautiful and such a good reminder of what a beautiful, wondrous world we live in- I just had to post them!

My brother has been giving me a subscription to National Geographic for years as my Christmas present. I am so thankful for the work they do, for their documentation and support of research projects around the world. May we really begin to see some real environmental protection in 2009!

Hello, World! Best National Geographic Photos of 2008

Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand "Earth From Above" To Exhibit in New York

Algae in the Gulf of Morbihan, France. For more than a century, oyster farms have been the privileged sites for the introduction of exotic species. In the 1920s an epidemic decimated Crassostrea angulata, the most widely exploited oyster species in France. A Japanese species, Crassostrea gigas, was then introduced - and, involuntarily along with it, some thirty species of animals and algae that today live in the waters of the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. One example is the Sargasso (Sargassum muticum), a brown algae, seen here in the Gulf of Morbihan, where it has become a part of the local flora. [map] (© Yann Arthus-Bertrand)


A friend of mine sent me a link to this photo exhibit:
"Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand will bring his work back to the United States - to New York City for the first time in 2009. Aiming to inspire people to think globally about sustainable living, Arthus-Bertrand has been photographing unique views of our planet, seen from the sky, since 1994 - and has produced an exhibit of over 150 4-ft. by 6-ft. prints which will be on display in New York City at the World Financial Center Plaza and along the Battery Park City Esplanade from May 1, 2009 to June 28, 2009. When completed in New York City, the Earth From Above exhibit will also move on to California in 2010. Photographs and captions all courtesy of Yann Arthus-Bertrand."

The photos are absolutely stunning. Textures from above contrast with gorgeous colors and patterns, often showing the human impact on nature. Boston.com shows 38 photos from around the world, all looking down on our world with this photographer's bird's eye. You will not regret the visit!

Tea cultivation in Corrientes province, Argentina. The fertility of the red soil and the regular rains of the Corrientes region create the ideal conditions for the cultivation of tea. In an effort to protect the soil against erosion, tea is planted along curved terraces and protected from the wind by hedges. Unlike Asian and African countries, where the young sprouts are handpicked, in Argentina mechanical harvesting is the rule, done mainly with high-clearance tractors that are driven along the straight rows of tea bushes. [map] (© Yann Arthus-Bertrand)

Mountainous countryside near Maelifellssandur, Myrdalsjökull Region, Iceland. Once the young lava fields of Iceland cool down, life begins anew little by little. Ice, wind and water flatten and carve out shapes to begin with, then, during the summer, bacteria, lichen and fungi prepare the soil for plants, in particular mosses which adapt to an environment which remains difficult. These plants colonise the most favourable sites and terrain little by little, forming a new ecosystem. [map] (© Yann Arthus-Bertrand)

I went on over to Yann's website. As expected, more treasures await exploration. These photos are the result of years of work and a fascinating personal history. The website also has many tools available for educators and fun imaging tools like screen savers and posters. The message throughout is a clear cry for sustainable development and protection of earth's biodiversity. The bio below the photo is from the site. As I read the accomplishments of people like Yann, I am always filled with hope for our troubled world's future.

Photo by Antoine Verdet

"Born in 1946, Yann Arthus-Bertrand has always been fond of nature. It was in the late 70s, in Kenya, while studying with his wife Anne the every day life of a pride of lions that, that he truly became a photographer. He understood that he had to tell the facts through images rather than words. He also discovered the beauty of the world seen from above when he became a hot air balloon pilot and began experimenting aerial photography. Upon his return to France, he published in 1981 his first book Lions, first release of a series of 80 books. He also began a career as a reporter-photographer and closely worked with various naturalists including Dian Fossey and her mountain gorillas in Rwanda. His work was published in many internationally known magazines such as Paris Match, Geo, Life or National Geographic.

In 1991, he created Altitude, the first photo agency specialized in aerial photography. In the 90s, under the patronage of UNESCO, he embarked upon his most ambitious project: creating an image bank of the earth seen from above. Yann’s aim was to create a record of the world’s environment for present and future generations. In 1999, his work was published and The Earth from Above, translated in 24 languages, became one of the best selling illustrated books with more than three million copies sold worldwide. The Earth from Above is also an open-air free access exhibition that travels in more than 100 cities around the world and has attracted to this date over 100 million visitors. But it is still a work in progress. Many countries remain to be visited, and geographical coordinates of every shot will allow other photographers and scientists to locate and document the evolution of these sites.

At the same time, Yann Arthus-Bertrand carries on with the systematic inventory of house pets and domestic breeds, photographing the animals in the studio or outdoors against a canvas backdrop. In 2003 he launched "Six Billion Others". Cameramen travel the world to meet and interview people as a mean to portray the planet under a humanistic angle. To date more than 4.000 interviews have been filmed in more than 65 countries. In 2005 Yann Arthus-Bertrand created GoodPlanet, a non-profit organization which is dedicated to the promotion of sustainable development, his leitmotiv, through all his different projects. Yann would like to enable each and every one of us to become a custodian of our planet’s future and consequently of our own future. He also directed a series of four, two hour documentaries entitled Earth From Above – which was shown on French television in 2006-2007 –, and started this year the production of a feature length film on the state of the global environment and the challenges we are facing."

Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand "Earth From Above" To Exhibit in New York