Color

The Art of Enjoyability Pertaining to Art

Posted on by armcurl7

While it isn’t something that I think most people would like to discuss or even think about one area I think many people tend to turn a blind eye to is enjoyment. Specifically, in art, I’d like to dive into the idea that enjoyment isn’t some sort of mysterious thing out in the aether that is unattainable.

Enjoyment is attainable … but only in moments and in brevity.

However, one thing I’d like to discuss is this attitude of complete apathy that you may not find any enjoyment and as a result reject it. In my own experiences this is a very dangerous position to take but more importantly the person at a loss isn’t the creator of the art but rather only you.

That and combined with this continued view of overcritical analysis and logic being forced upon movies (and other art forms) and it starts to become more and more clear hopefully what I’m talking about.

A few posts ago I talked shortly about how I keep seeing reviews of films and more importantly of just art in general where people instead of trying to understand the art (or where it is coming from) try to destroy, put down, over criticize, and essentially put down art continually. I keep seeing these haughty one-liners, overly sarcastic and simplified responses (that aren’t actually responses) but rather regularized overtures told again and again until it is accepted as the norm.

It’s like I keep seeing over and over again “If you tell a big lie loud enough and long enough … people will believe you”. Overall it’s something I feel is a travesty and seems to have taken specifically a hold onto general views of art. We don’t want to actually dive into the art we are watching, playing, or experiencing but rather simply take what we see at face value according to the views and connotations that we hold.

I’ll a relate an experience that I had over this past weekend. As of course it was 4th of July and everyone was in appearance for our family gathering. Of course meetings of the sort aren’t without their trifles and ample rubbings up against each other. However, it was a good meeting overall and very amicable. Yet, there was a few conversations that caught my attention, particularly those relating to views of movies and our different experiences with those movies.

I’m not sure when it happened when we were having this conversation but I began to realize many of the points that my fellow siblings were making were based around commonly held beliefs from popular online media like “honest trailers” or “cinema sins” or “how it should have ended”.

What do all of those media producers have in common you might ask? They all sacrifice the creations or the art that other people have potentially slaved over and simplifies them down to simple quips and sarcastic cheesy (BUT FUNNY) one-liners and tags. All the while they profit and grow at the creators expense.

Now I’m not saying satire has no place or that there isn’t a reason to have it but it just seems to be that this brutal satire and sort of overly logical and critical approach to judging movies and moreover art is having an affect on the perception of films. It’s not enough to make an outstanding film like “Interstellar” when the movie can just be tagged down to oversimplified views like honest trailers does often. They don’t see the level of detail and care used to craft a moving, wrought, and beautiful film but rather only, “Lincoln Lawyer crying”.

Like I’ve mentioned I’ve always loved those channels but now I’m getting to the point where I’m asking myself if it is necessary to continue being so critical and to enjoy their critiques at such a frequency. It’s why I’ve started watching Channels like “Cinema Wins” which documents when movies do well as a sort of poultice to this wound I keep making.

We need to look at the good with the bad and not just the bad. Otherwise we’ll just become disenfranchised people never able to enjoy a single piece of art put our way.

However, I’m willing to share a secret that gives me a great deal of satisfaction for whenever I watch movies and play videogames or enjoy any kind of art really.

1. I don’t hype up or put down a movie or art piece. In fact I try as much as possible to go into every movie with a sort of wiped palate or a clean slate. From there I simply try approach the movie as is. Of course this isn’t always the case but even when I watch films I typically withhold judgement till the end of the film. There are only rare occasions where I let something grating simply affect my judgement. Walking out of films simply because, ” I don’t like them ” is a ridiculous reason. Maybe instead you should ask WHY you don’t like them or WHY this situation doesn’t sit well with you.

2. For spoilers I welcome them. For me it’s not always exactly what happens in the story but rather how it happens or is executed that makes me more interested. For example, most videogames and movies follow very simple Cinderella “rags to riches and success” story arcs throughout their narratives. However, what changes them inexplicably is their style, execution, and the worlds in which they are placed. Case in point Star Wars: The Force Awakens to which I predicted almost 90% of the possible storyline just from watching the trailers. Did that affect my enjoyment of the movie? Not in the slightest and in fact foreshadowing and foreknowledge of events to happen is often a boon to build anticipation and not a negative aspect.

3. Try to understand your material you are watching. I watch a very wide breadth of film and movies and in my collection of games I play one would consider me an indie gamer or a “purist” of sorts. There isn’t any musical genre I say no to and there isn’t any videogame experience I wouldn’t immediately write off. Let me explain with a story about my own views of art. For years I thought that modern art was atrocious and rightly so I recognized that it wasn’t human but more abstract. It didn’t represent the world and views that I knew and I feel I got some of that view from my father who also didn’t enjoy it. However, as I started to learn more about art and it’s history and development of something like Modern Art I began to realize that it wasn’t the style or methodologies that I disliked about Modern Art but rather the messages being conveyed through them. Today I am a big fan of Modern Art but with hopefully some measure of taste and knowing that the style is predicated upon breaking down of forms to base elements and imagery. Another case of this is when people say they can’t stand certain elements or feeling a certain way in film. Have you ever thought that maybe directors, creators, and makers have purposely designed to make you feel frightened, scared, happy, or fraught? For example, Grima Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings purposely had his eyebrows shaved so as to increase the level of uneasiness around his character or sometimes movies use low pitched frequencies that naturally will increase stress or anxiety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%ADma_Wormtongue

http://www.strangerdimensions.com/2013/06/21/infrasound-the-fear-frequency/

4. The last criterion, which will help you gain an appreciable attitude to almost any art and hold tight to enjoyment of it across the board, are ideas and execution. No two points are more necessary for critiquing art than these. For example if there is a movie that has ideas which are conveyed in a good manner then I won’t necessarily fault it as much if the execution is not up to par. However, if the execution and production values are off the charts but the ideas aren’t necessarily what I think would have made a good movie or are good ideas I will focus on the good in that. When both of these meet and are both good that is when great movies or amazing movies are born. So keep a look out for these things.

Anyways hope that my words were insightful or helpful in any way possible. Keep watching, keep making, and don’t stop enjoying art.

Color Chromatose

Posted on by armcurl7

It’s not every day that you find something absolutely stunning and incredible when it comes to art. But when you do it’s reason to celebrate and tells others about it just as you would any truly good thing. Anyways so last night I was playing through the DLC of a game I had beat a while ago called “Dishonored”. It is a game that is all about decisions and even puts the ultimate burden of how lethal you want to be to beat the game on your side of the court. It is set in a world that is supposed to be in many ways similar to London near the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. While playing through you deal with undermining, political moves, assassinations, and a plague not to unlike that of the black plague. The style of the game visually makes it look as though it is an older Victorian era painting using older techniques reticent of the renaissance to make a strong tenebrism or high contrast of colors of dark and light. Combine that with it’s softer textures and the game becomes quite another beauty itself to look at.
However, it is not the actual game itself that astounded me alone last night but the paintings within the art piece that I saw.  More importantly these pieces that are about to come.

10684385 dishonored painting 3 dishonored painting 6 Dishonored-The-Brigmore-Witches-DLC-–-Delilah’s-in-game-Paintings-1-717x1024 Dishonored-The-Brigmore-Witches-DLC-–-Delilah’s-in-game-Paintings-2-741x1024 The-Brigmore-Witches-7

Incredible right? And to think that these are pieces that are simply hung up as set dressing for the world of “Dishonored”. In fact many of these you might pass by unnoticed unless you took the time to actually look at them. Still there is something more incredible going on and it is a hearkening back to the time period the game is supposed to take place in the turn into the 20th Century and particularly with the Art of the Post-Impressionism and Fauvism types of styles and movements.

More importantly at work here in these paintings is a sort of technique in color mixing and of color theories that were spearheaded by Ogden Rood in his book, “Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry”. In it he describes the problem that arises when mixing certain pigments by which the colors become defused or lessened particularly purple. This causes a drop in the popping of the painting and contrast overall. So how to overcome such an issue? Simple, Optical Mixturing or so it is called. In was a technique first used by the Post-Impressionist such ad Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Paul Gaugin. Particularly Georges Seurat’s piece “Sunday on the Grand Jatte” uses it extensively to pull the image back up towards the front and provide depth along with more realistic colors. It is fascinating because the way Optical Mixturing is achieved is by placing certain complimentary colors close but not mixed near each other and by which the colors in your mind will automatically mix the two creating something else entirely such as mixing blue and red via dots might make certain shades of purple. However, instead of making a more dour purple you end up with a far more lighter or luminescent or vibrant purple.

But back to the smoky colored “Dishonored” paintings. I’ll pull up my favorite.

Dishonored-The-Brigmore-Witches-DLC-–-Delilah’s-in-game-Paintings-7-678x1024

Now obviously with something this astounding and mesmerizing there are quite a lot of things going on. But here you are seeing an advanced version of Optical Mixturing. Notice how there are barely and full real skin tones and that the only ones that are achieved are via the mixing of several colors via the technique mentioned before. The colors might mix but they also are disparate and that allows them to create different hues and shades of various parts. Yet, this piece is also doing something else very interesting and that is it’s delving into Fauvism. Fauvism was also a movement around the same time as the Post-Impressionists and relied also on a very painterly and stroked look combined with colors that really popped. However, what is interesting is that these paintings combine the best of both and in a way create a hybrid of the two (Neo Fauvpressionism) meanwhile also falling possibly into Surrealism.

12-11_delilah_04

Here is a close up of the face. I love how for the highlights the artist used a light blue in various shades combined with the darker blues. You almost never see true black entirely and the darkest that you get is with the darker browns allowing for a overall more dour look but also a nice lightening of a otherwise darker picture.

These paintings are absolutely wonderful to look at and dissect and carry a lot of emotion that you don’t always see because it’s based more in the emotion of the colors than anything else.

Minimalismo

Posted on by armcurl7

Uses the Roadgeek 2005 fonts. (United States l...

Uses the Roadgeek 2005 fonts. (United States law does not permit the copyrighting of typeface designs, and the fonts are meant to be copies of a U.S. Government-produced work anyway.) Colors are from http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/kno-colorspec.htm (Pantone Red 187), converted to RGB by http://www.reeddesign.co.uk/test/pantone2rgb.html. The outside border has a width of 1 (1 mm) and a color of black so it shows up; in reality, signs have no outside border. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here is a response I wrote to an article by Jessica Enders. I wrote it in hopes that you can appreciate some more great conversation about UI design and even more so the coming mobile world.

http://alistapart.com/article/flat-ui-and-forms

 I love this article by Jessica Enders not because it is incredibly far out there as on its critiques of flat design but because it is saying something that a lot of people have been saying for a while, myself included, but in a well articulated manner. But in particular it captures upon the dreaded push and pull graphic designers walk on the tightrope between aesthetics and function. As in the discussion she has on the form and content and also differentiating between the cancel and submit button. Absolute and true function, or design that is minimalist to the core, in trying to simplify a task of an app or poster or visual mobile element is no longer a designed thing but rather simply content or information. That is what makes being part of the design process on things such as these so interesting is that you get to influence people into what is important visually.

Setting up a hierarchy is so incredibly important for what you want to do in the mobile world such as in the comparing between the submit and cancel button being exactly the same. However, I would say even to go a step further rather than just having links be lower on the hierarchy than buttons but to even colorize the negative in red. After all humans naturally have an affinity to using red as slowing down or stopping due to simple natural things in our daily lives like stop signs and stop lights or warning signs. Naturally then it would make sense to keep red reserved for that unless your design is based around the color red however, I would still strongly suggest against that.

Still, I agree with her quite a bit for making that which can be filled in as hollow looking or of the appearance of being able to be filled as much as possible. After all it makes sense right to do something like this. One way you could get around this is by making sure to use gray scale to check the values of your colors to make sure your colors aren’t close in contrast. That way you can avoid that dreadful pink colored UI form that Jessica referenced in her article. Talk about …. just … it hurt my eyes a lot ok.