[HN Gopher] On Light, Colors, Mixing Paints, and Numerical Optim...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       On Light, Colors, Mixing Paints, and Numerical Optimization
        
       Author : ibobev
       Score  : 67 points
       Date   : 2024-02-26 19:02 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | sagebird wrote:
       | This is a lovely exploration of color. Thank you for sharing.
        
       | sdenton4 wrote:
       | Absolutely love this.
       | 
       | I've been getting into mixing for miniature painting myself, but
       | with a bit of added perspective which (I think) isn't captured
       | here.
       | 
       | It turns out there's more than just raw color going on here.
       | Acrylic paints have different degrees of opacity, and you can
       | increase transparency by mixing in acrylic medium. Additionally,
       | adding water and/or flow-improver helps the acrylics slide off
       | flat surfaces into crevices, producing deeper colors in recesses
       | and thinner applications in open areas - this is the principle
       | which gives us washes, shades, and contrast/speed paints.
       | 
       | And there's basic acrylic mediums (matte or gloss) but also
       | specialty mediums which have more texture (gels, modeling pastes)
       | or additives (pumice, fiber, glass micro-beads). [Edit: And of
       | course, Metallics!!! There's a few different additives, like
       | mica, which are used to create metallic paints.]
       | 
       | Together, this points to a combinatorial problem: No pre-mixed
       | bottles will ever cover all of the possibilities, so you have to
       | start mixing paints (and mediums!) to achieve the desired effects
       | in any particular project.
        
       | dt23 wrote:
       | Such a nice surprisingly thorough overview (nice diagrams too!)
        
       | oluckyman wrote:
       | Nice description! For project of this type that has been going
       | for 20 years, and covers many different paint sets, see
       | https://zsolt-kovacs.unibs.it/colormixingtools
        
       | itronitron wrote:
       | Nice write up from a technical/engineering perspective however it
       | has some notable gaps on the color 'perception' side.
        
       | fjfaase wrote:
       | I know an artist who is an expert of mixing colors and lightning.
       | He spend his whole life mixing colors. In the past decades he
       | created several color palettes to be use inside and/or outside
       | buildings [1]. In 2013 and 2014 he created 21 works (consisting
       | of pairs of paintings) that contain color palettes experimenting
       | with variations of brightness and saturation of six evenly passed
       | colors [2]. In 2020/2021, he created eight works with color
       | palettes existing of twelve even passed colors with the same
       | brightness and saturation (by daylight) [3].
       | 
       | He complains a lot about lightning in museums, that it deviates a
       | lot from daylight, while many works of art are create by
       | daylight. The light is often too yellow, based on some 'dubious'
       | research that museum visitors prefer yellow light. LED lightning
       | often causes mixtures of pigments that look the same under
       | daylight to look different under LED lightning. LED lightning
       | often is rather weak in the infra-red to red part of the spectrum
       | cause most reds in painting to fade. He found a combination of a
       | reddish and a blue TL-lamps supporting to LED lights to give a
       | better approximation of daylight. When this was applied to some
       | museum rooms, the son of a man who donated a work, asked what
       | they did with it work as it looked again like how it looked at
       | their home when it was hung close to the windows. (Shortly after
       | this the museum director decided to use only LED lightning for
       | the new wing that was going to be build.)
       | 
       | The problem of course is that we are so used to adapt our color
       | vision to the lightning that most people do not see the
       | difference. I guess that people who mix colors all the time,
       | develop some kind of absolute color vision and do notice the
       | effect of improper lightning on art works.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.pstruycken.nl/EnDyn.html?Li,tag=q&w
       | 
       | [2] https://www.pstruycken.nl/EnS14.html
       | 
       | [3] https://www.pstruycken.nl/EnS20.html
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-02-26 23:00 UTC)