I am a digital person. Proudly too. Yes, getting elbow deep in clay, markers, paint, and other kinds of delicious smelling raw-materials always ranks a 10 on the dude-I’m-so-happy meter, but it’s not efficient. The clone tool in Photoshop is efficient. Instant gradients in Illustrator are efficient. Apple + z. F7 for layers. Apple + T for type. You know?

And there’s also color efficiency. Beautiful, vivid colors a mouse slide away. Color wheels that come in a million formats: HTML, RGB, CMYK, HSB, duotones. The wheels have endless ways of forming themselves.

~

The other day, I needed to use some food coloring to get some food
stuff to look pretty. The colors came in four small tubes: red, yellow,
green, and blue.

The four colors of my childhood that were later shattered by rockets of pixels and Pantones.

I
was amazed at my brain as I mixed them together. I couldn’t see them as
simply red, yellow, green and blue. My mind was instantly doing
calculations, imagining the Illustrator color slider that is
permanently on show on the right-hand-side of my screen.

My mind
would drag the cursor, trying to substitute the nonexistent K,
horrified that it can’t get that perfectly rich shade of K to mix with
my colors. Then my mind would switch the slider to RGB, but the blue
wasn’t real B, it was B with tons of R.

I
am often accused of being color-blind by “normal” people. I can’t get
myself to agree that that shirt is bright blue, because bright blue to
me is C, and that shirt has a little Y in it, so it is not bright blue.
But get a “normal” person to see that.

~

A 6-hours-a-week “Color Theory” course was mandatory at the Fine Arts Department. Of course. Design is after all, the lowest form of “art”, and the department preferred catering to the students specializing in painting, or graphic arts, or all the other sorts of elbow-deep specializations.

I’d spend double the hours at home for the projects assigned to that class. Painting color wheels manually. A drop of white in a drop of red, plus another drop of white, then a drop of black. It’s as precise as math. I wasn’t very good at it, I do not have the patience.

~

Yes. I live in a world of CMYK. And it’s awesome.

Did you enjoy this? Be awesome and share: