RGBDESIGNER GALLERY #1
Collecting Clusters of Colour
Concocting camouflage or activating attention?
A user manual often tells you how to use something but it doesn’t always tell you why to use something.
When I started out developing rgbDesigner I had a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve and why. The final step in this case being the how.
How?
The closest thing that came to mind was the analogue synthesizer. Music is an abstract creation that can still manage to be understood by most people.
It is not telling a story as such, it is evoking a mood.
The operation of an analogue synthesizer perfectly matches the objective of music. Its goal is not to make something but to evoke a mood. A seemingly meaningless set of parameters coalesce to create a sound, thus evoking an atmosphere.
Admittedly, it doesn’t work like this for everyone. Many people don’t listen to instrumental music. Without the explicit narrative of the lyrics, their emotional relationship with the music feels incomplete.
What the synthesizer does with sound, I wanted to do with pictures.
It’s not about telling a specific story, but to evoking a mood visually. Tuning in the image the way a synth tunes in the tone and texture.
It’s easy to get caught up in trends. It can often mean our brains are doing more of the looking than our eyes. What do our eyes see, not just on the computer screens in front of us, but in the world around us?
It’s a story that needs to be told visually. Not with a manual, but with examples of how what I’m seeing in the world around me connects into my exploration of colour. Which brings us to this new rgbDesigner series, rgbDesigner Gallery, which will present a series of tableaus of colour exploration.
The Spirit of Hobart
The Spirit of Hobart is a dinky little ferry that we often see out on the Derwent Estuary. For the non-Tasmanians in the audience, the colour scheme is a parody of the somewhat more majestic Spirit of Tasmania, the ferry that travels from Tasmania to the mainland of Australia.
All of the colours are derived using the image picker in rgbDesigner’s palette screen (bottom left hand corner). The colours are blended into a gradient (top right hand corner) with a selection of images created on the image screen shown below.
Oh Buoy! Down at the Docks
This brightly coloured yellow buoy hasn’t just attracted the attention of the mariners. Sampling the colours also provides a timely lesson in colour perception. The cormorant of the left is clearly perceived as white, while the sampled colour is darker.
On The Beach
A moody twilight sky as autumn begins to settle in at Howrah Beach, Tasmania.
rgbDesigner is an app for iPad. If you’d like to download the app before we get started, you can do that here. The app is a monthly subscription and comes with a 7 day free trial.
If you’re new to rgbDesigner, you might like to start here:
