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| Photograph gridded in Photoshop using the free Accurasee software available from the company's website. |
Artist G Bjorn Thorkelson has recently released Accudraw, an application for the iPhone, based on his Accurasee Measurement System. The app allows users to easily add a latticed overlay to photos stored on their phone, and to then manipulate both the image and the grid in order to attain the picture proportions best suited to the work at hand. For the month of December, Accudraw is free from the iTunes store.
To me, this application would make the iPhone a great improvement over compositional viewfinders when painting en plein air. After all, having a 2D image of the landscape before you would make sketching the scene easier, especially when the vastness of the surrounding environment is visually overwhelming. So draw from the phone screen, but paint from real-life observation; once the elements are loosely indicated on the canvas, put the phone away!
Thorkelson has also just gained approval for another application for the iPhone called Accuview. Accuview has all of the same features as Accudraw, but also allows the user to convert their images to black and white for an easier assessment of values. Included in the app is an adjustable, floating value scale to make those measurements of tonal relationships nearly foolproof. Currently, this app is also free at the iTunes store.
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| Screenshot from the new Accuview a iPhone app. |
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| Palette swatches created from a painting by Michael Klein. |
Some other interesting software which can be found online are palette generators, available for free from several different sources. These programs were created to help web designers choose harmonious colors for website page layouts based on a single image (eg. a photograph of a company product). Once an image is uploaded, the application extracts colors from that picture, and uses them to create a series of swatches with their corresponding hexadecimal values (the codes which indicate colors in HTML). Often, these palettes can then easily be transferred to Photoshop.
The usefulness, to painters, of these digital palettes varies. They can, of course, aid in designing your own website, or in isolating a color for matting your art, but mostly, I think they are just wonderful curiosities which provide a different way of analytically looking at favorite works of art.
Color generator sites include: pics2colors, whatsitscolor, Adobe Kuler, and Color Palette Generator.
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| The Adobe kuler site is particularly fun, and gives several options for designing your own palettes formed around triad, complementary, analogous, and compound color relationships. |
8 comments:
Good post Matthew, thanks. When some folks are playing solitaire online, I'm at Adobe's Kuler site, playing with color palettes. Love it. I'll check out the other color sites you mentioned.
As for the apps, those look very useful as well. Gosh, it's a new world every day, or at least every visit to the iTunes store. I especially like the one that converts the image to b&w values. I've actually used my digital camera for doing that when plein air painting. I experimented with taping a piece of acetate over the rear screen and drawing a grid on it. Very helpful, but only if you want a faithful reproduction of the scene before you, rather than creating an amalgam of the elements before you, arranged to your own liking... hey there's an idea for an app... it could be called "Barn Mover".
Very interesting post. It simplifies things in a learnable fashion. I teach beginners and it makes me think of a different rational approach.
Interesting as a compositional tool. Definitely could be useful to quickly play with different compositions, although the iPhone's camera (and all cameras) are so far from the natural exposure of the eye that getting value judgments from there would be nothing but trouble.
My favourite color app is http://www.colourlovers.com/
simply great
Thanks for posting these! I can't wait to try some of them for plein air work.
Makes me want to by the iphone, just for this accuview app. It really simplifies things for painting.
This is for putos
Hey Andrew- I always leave room for dissenting opinions, but I would appreciate it if you could state your opinions using reasoning, and a respect for everyone else here who participates in the blog.
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