#lighting and rendering

Notes from Ted Poison’s, The Noble Approach: Maurice Noble the Zen of Animation Design.

- prismatic vs pigment color = light vs paint

- “The key to good color is to think about why you’re using the colors you are.”

- black, white, and read are the “primitive” colors, and therefore are the “most powerful”

- using black along with a slight texture could be interesting

- yellow is most abundantly found in nature

- “green is neither exciting nor depressing” 

- the larger the area the color takes up, the less pure the color should be, generally

- brown and middle grey can often “suck the life” out of a scene

- it’s really easy to use too much color, or too many colors, in a scene

- can simplify palettes using “color themes” and “color chords”

- color can distinguish ideas of space or areas - ex) outside vs inside

- Analogous Color Schemes: three colors next to each other on the color wheel. the third color is often used as an accent

- Complementary Color Schemes: good for emphasizing a certain part of the scene, black, white, and grey are usually used as accents

- Split-Complementary Color Schemes: usually analogous scheme as the base, then uses a complementary accent

- Triadic Color Scheme: colors from three points evenly around the color wheel, can easily look disjointed if saturation is high or shapes are too even, “best to let one color dominate, using the other two as accents”

- Rectangle Color Scheme: basically double-complimentary, especially important to let one color or set dominate and use others as accents

- Square Color Scheme: four even spaced colors on wheel, be careful about balancing hue, saturation, and value

- “Color from the characters can be echoed in the background color to unify a picture. Or try color isolation, where colors that don’t exist in the background can be used to make a character stand out.” 

- reference everything to the color of the characters and make sure the characters read at all times

- design hierarchy - make sure the most important parts of the character are emphasized and clear

- can use spots of saturated color to bring attention to the head 

- I think it’s really cool how even the color design of Bugs Bunny changed based upon what type of background he was going to be on during any given animation

- color characters to reflect their personalities; like how Bugs Bunny is grey and level-headed, and Daffy is black/orange/white and explosive

- there’s a photo of an early design of Witch Hazel where her dress is red, and I totally understand now what he means about how a given area can’t be too large if it’s a saturated color, because it’s really hard to focus on her face at all

Notes on a reading from The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color by Johannes Itten. 

- Already love the quote “If you, unknowing, are able to create masterpieces in color, then unknowledge is your way. But if you are unable to create masterpieces in color out of your unknowledge, then you ought to look for knowledge.”

- the value of a color may be determined by relation to an achromatic color (like black white or grey) or to other chromatic colors

- so because of this colors look different depending on what’s around them

- yellow on white = warm, yellow on black = cool, red on white = saturated, red on black = warmer and more varied, blue on white = dark, blue on black = luminescence, grey on blue = redder, grey on orange = bluer, 

- I really liked this quote too, “Once a theme has been conceived, the design must follow that primary ruling concept. If color is the chief vehicle of expression, composition must begin with color areas, and these will determine the lines.”

- at some point he also says that the idea of “harmonious” and “discording” colors is completely subjective, which is pretty interesting to think about

- Successive contrast = the phenomenon of seeing complementary colors after looking at a particular color for too long and closing your eyes, or the illusion of seeing a color-tinged grey when it’s surrounded by another color

- medium grey is equilibrium for seeing colors because when you mix complementary colors you get grey/black. Makes sense.

- this sense of “harmony” is also effected and defined by proportion, saturation, and relative shapes of the colors. The more ordered these are, the more harmonious.

- there is a certain ratio that is the most harmonious- yellow:red:blue=3:6:8

- when in this ratio, all colors read pure.  ( “static effect”)

- I love and totally agree with the idea that the way an individual uses color is indicative of their personality, but I’m not sure I totally believe the writer’s list of students whose careers ended up corresponding with their colors...

- it’s a cool idea to think that we ourselves are composed of color - “When an individual dies he blanches”

- another great quote “Interpretation of subjective color combinations is not to be based on the several chromas and their emotional values alone. The timbre as a whole is of most importance, then the placement of the colors relative to each other, their directions, brilliances, clarity or turbidity, their proportions, textures, and rhythmic relationships.”

- lighting can be used to emphasize what you’re selling - green/blue lights for meats

- i like the idea that when designing something, like architecture, oftentimes the people that will like it are those who share the same color preferences and those who don’t won’t like it

- The Seven Color Contrasts: hue, light-dark, cold-warm, complementary, simultaneous, saturation, extension