Posted by ouli 4 days ago
No signup, no paywall, no email capture. Just curious what people think.
> Starting in the Renaissance, artists made sculpture and architecture that exalted form over color, in homage to what they thought Greek and Roman art had looked like. In the eighteenth century, Johann Winckelmann, the German scholar who is often called the father of art history, contended that “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” and that “color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty.” When the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were first excavated, in the mid-eighteenth century, Winckelmann saw some of their artifacts in Naples, and noticed color on them. But he found a way around that discomfiting observation, claiming that a statue of Artemis with red hair, red sandals, and a red quiver strap must have been not Greek but Etruscan—the product of an earlier civilization that was considered less sophisticated. He later concluded, however, that the Artemis probably was Greek. (It is now thought to be a Roman copy of a Greek original.) Østergaard and Brinkmann believe that Winckelmann’s thinking was evolving, and that he might eventually have embraced polychromy, had he not died in 1768, at the age of fifty, after being stabbed by a fellow-traveller at an inn in Trieste
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh... cited by https://bsky.app/profile/ellipticalnight.bsky.social/post/3m...
Man, what a line. What a horror, this projection of opinion! From the "Father of Art History"! To rob the world so! I feel this way all the time, that anti-sentiment, that the pure marble world just stately and so is art and perfection, over the colors of the universe & it's possibility!
> "the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is"
This should make your blood run cold, imo. A world locked in amber view of reality, static, sedate. Whew.
For some additional context; many old pigments were not stable at all.
https://www.vangoghstudio.com/what-were-the-original-colors-...
Or do you need to infer it based on location, budget, time, climate etc?
As far as I'm aware there is no way to know for sure what colours originally looked like, especially if the information is limited. There are so many variables, we can only guess.
There has been some research on what causes degradation on paper/pigment but as far as I know much of it ends up as a mystery, a fact of time...
But seriously. I am not against ai slops in general, people explore what’s possible to make. But I don’t really appreciate them at Show HN - there should be a new thread for ai-made or -assisted projects, or there should be a disclosure in project description.
And the pigments fade. And even worse, they fade at various rates and some are almost completely gone.
Generally, a painting is best viewed and photographed in as close a lighting environment as it was painted. I have seen many paintings 'blasted' by unnaturally bright gallery lights. There is a reason why a gallery lighting designer is a real job. However, in my experience effective gallery lighting designers are as rare as rocking horse shit.
It is true that the paint the artists applied many years ago will often bear little resemblance to that which we now see. This is less true of earth browns and very true of paintings done at the beginning of the pigment revolution, when wonderful colors were produced which were later discovered to be very 'fugitive'. However, the relative relationship between these paints remains more or less intact, and IMHO this is the most important factor in aesthetic evaluation.
Another factor is how a photo flattens such differences as rough vs smooth (and their consequent light reflection properties). In a Titian painting, huge areas are untouched rough red oxide primer on rough canvas, vs the slight gloss of oil paint. Importantly, old masters would often apply their lights as (smooth) thick paint and their dark as thin glazes (or scumbles) above a thin primer (red or green or yellow ochre or whatever). The frisson between these layers gave the darks their depth that they would otherwise have lacked. This is mastery of dynamic range at its finest. Googles art project photos comes close to capturing this. For an example, check out any portrait by Durer in Google art project.
Basically
$average = new Imagick( $file );
$average->quantizeImage( $numColors, Imagick::COLORSPACE_RGB, 0, false, false ); //Reduce the amount of colors to 10
$average->uniqueImageColors(); //Only save one pixel of each color
I've thought about making this for a long time to help me with painting, but in that case I think to be useful you need a bit more ways to see the data -- mostly, the thing that is the most important is value. So to get something useful out of it you need a distribution of the hues conditioned value.
And for design, the problem is a bit different. You may have a good looking palette, but 'inverting it' for dark mode is not trivial, and neither are gradients, getting intermediate colors, or getting a shifted hue.
It's called inspiration so it's fulfilling its promise, I'm just curious what are your thoughts on these since you obviously thought a lot about it.
>As a creative, one needs to develop their own <creative thing/technique> for what they are trying to create. So what is the value in looking at how other creative things were made?
That's not the how of the process at all, that's the end result. The "how" for traditional art is completely different; it is taking pigments as a base rather than light, and the algebra of composition is not the same either.
Small snag, some UTF8 things are going on with some colour names, I am sure you know and have cursed accordingly.
I like OKLCH colours and the ability to mix them in interesting ways using CSS things. This means I don't do hex codes for colours in CSS. I can translate though, however, soon some people will demand OKLCH, so you might as well add it in, trying to get it natural with the picker.
I appreciate the masters but I wonder how this would work using other sources, for example, Sunday newspaper supplements from the last century, and their glossy adverts, which were to a higher standard than what we get today.
There are 2 art style pages namely Advertising and Posters styles: https://paletteinspiration.com/advertisement-palettes/ https://paletteinspiration.com/poster-palettes/
I am aware that Advertisement palettes mostly based on Alphonse Mucha work since I could not include more recent ad illustrations for copywrite reasons.
I digress, back to HARSH criticism!!!
Playfair, Serif, in small sizes, I am not a fan. I can see why, and it works for H1 and H2, but, for those of us with elderly eyes, please can we have a sans-serif such as Inter, which does work on smaller sizes? Maybe A/B test that one, with the screen zoom level captured. My hunch is that I am not alone in having elderly eyesight and that people will be more engaged if they have an easier time of reading.
Next bit of harsh criticism - HTML standards. There does seem to be a use case for 'figure' and 'figcaption'. These work like the 2003 era 'div' and nobody cares about HTML, but why bother with HTML if everything is just divs nested in spans and divs?
In truth, 'div' is the element of last resort and not needed since we have joyful content sectioning elements such as 'section', 'article', 'aside' and much else. We also have a layout engine in CSS, as in CSS grid, and, in my experience, the 'div' is not helping. Code is just better when it is not a sea of divs, each with a gazillion class tags.
We have arrived at a situation where people just use 'div' because that was how grandpa wrote HTML when the iPhone came along and table layouts suddenly had to be 'responsive', as in bloated. We built whole departments around writing code badly with 'div' elements, with whole teams of micromanagers. On pet projects there is no need for any of this, plus you can do things like scoped CSS so there is no Firefox support, but also no need to torment oneself with CSS compiler things that create bloat and 'add to only' stylesheets.
But hey, none of this matters if everything works, which it does!
I also think you need some type of funnel to get people to the website in such a way that they come back. This might not matter to you, but, imagine you find this site, do you bookmark it, share a link with oneself, or what? There needs to be some type of hook, and bookmarks don't cut it these days. People want to Google Search for what they know.
One hook might be an upload feature, so you can upload many things. I like de Stihl artists from a century ago and some of them used paint that is still sold today. I also like old posters for British Raleigh bicycles and train posters from the period. The train posters were by commercial artists that made adverts, not art. Yet you still have some brilliant colours going on in their work.
Yes there are services for taking any image and making a palette from it, however, they haven't got the art. They can't do a 'goes with' feature, to show art that is in the user's colour scheme, from what they upload.
I am impressed by the colour naming, this is actually quite hard to write by oneself since you need to find something in a 3D search space. It seems to me that you have the hard stuff mostly solved but tinkering with the UI for stickiness is there to be done, ad nauseum.
Please don't take my HARSH criticisms unfairly, HN is the place for people to niggle, because some people like to cut the heads off others to feel taller, however, I am a genuine punter, and I have a bit more work to do before I get into the colour scheme, so I kind of need to be able to read things easily, remember where your website is and give it a proper go.
What might be useful is a palette export option in :root { CSS variables }, for example:
:root {
--color-a: #aabbcc;
--color-b: #bbccdd;
--color-c: #ccddee;
}
:root {
--color-a: oklch(a, b, c);
--color-b: oklch(b, c, d);
--color-c: oklch(c, d, e);
}
I still get the autoload of the next palette, mayb what you need instead is a good bit of doom scrolling, a.k.a. infinite scroll. That might be more engaging. I say this because my recipe app also needs infinite scroll for browsing purposes, so the user (my uncle) does not have to drill down to the recipes.
1. You have used the RGB hue wheel not the RYB hue wheel. The later defines the complementary pairs red/green, blue/orange, yellow/purple which are more useful for an artist when evaluating hue. To those who would say that the difference between RTGB and RYB complementaries is subjective, I would point out that the red/green, blue/orange, yellow/purple pairs have been known by artists since before Newton first expressed hue on a wheel.
2. I think it is fair to assume an artist has a consistent color pallet, but I'm not sure that a genre would.
3. User S0und has implied that paintings have changed too much from their point of creation for your work to be valid. For sure it is true that paintings have oxidized, accumulated multiple layers of dust-attracting varnish and been damaged by UV exposure. However, the relative difference between the colors they have used remains almost the same, and this is where the value of your work lays.
4. The key problem of visualizing the color of a painting is its dimensionality. A standard histogram does a super fine job at expressing the lightness value of an image. A radial hue histogram does the same for the hue/saturation. But there is no 2D graphical visualization that does both. Personally, I would go further and visualize separately the hue, saturation and lightness signatures of the artists. For most pre-modern painters, the lightness values closely mirrored their saturation values. Artists like Gericault and most of the Impressionists learned to separate them.
BTW... do you know this website?: https://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/history.html
I think that the best visualization of the colors of a painting is by using the painting itself.
In class I demonstrate lightness by first desaturating the work (or copy pasting the L in Lab). I then do a controlled posterize on the image - basically a stepped curve in Photoshop. I try to isolate the dark, middle and light. These are relative values that can often manifest as lumps in the histogram. Painters tend to be very deliberate in the way they organize them. This page explains what I am getting at:
https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/colour-ligh...
In my experience such posterizing is best done manually but AI might be able to do it.
Hue at saturation are more difficult for the simple reason that they are difficult to disengage from lightness.
Like lightness, saturation is generally organized according to low, middle and high. For most of art history, the saturation of a painting would closely follow its lightness. It was Gericault who separated them. Check out the saturation vs lightness of his Lobster painting for an example of this.
Hue is a beast. Sure, most paintings done before the impressionists are pretty unsaturated. But even Rembrandt would be careful to use a red brown against a green brown. Check out the Rembrandt image on this page to see this in action.
https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/colour-hue-...
I think that a radial histogram is the best way to visualize hue. This would show not only the hues but there relationship to each other on the RYB wheel and also there quantity. There should be a cut-off point for hue that is visible. In our work we established a cut off - all hues with very low saturation were ignored.
Hope this helps.
See also: https://amandahinton.com/blog/creating-a-color-palette-from-...
For Monet, many of the paintings have an important color highlight (e.g., the orange sun), which isn't captured in any of the palettes.
Needs more tweaking.