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What’s your favorite color baby?

Posted by Rob Stein  |  Filed under New Media, Technology  |  3 Comments »

Sep 30 2008

Following up on Matt’s great post about web design tricks is a hard act to follow, but an awesome post I saw last week gives me some inspiration and a great way to spend a bit of time.

I’d been aware of the COLOURlovers site for a while and always thought it was cool.  The site is a bit like social media meets the paint chip display at your local hardware store.  I’m always amazed at the variety of colors and associations on display at these when I’m shopping for paint.  Whether its something obvious like “Slate Blue” or mysterious like “Dusty Cairo”, I’ve always thought that the guy/gal that names the colors has a great job!

That’s why I was pretty intrigued by the COLOURlovers post about Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night. This post is a great example of how inspirational some of the works of art in our collections can be for designers and artists looking for their muse.  Somehow, to me, pulling these colors out of their context makes me think about them differently?  I decided to give it a try myself!  Setting up and account and creating palettes turned out to be a really easy and enjoyable experience.  Check out my colour lovin’ palettes!

Not to knock on Van Gogh, but I think there are a lot of great works of art to get your color inspiration from here at the IMA! I picked out several of our favorite works from among the web folks here and created palettes for them.  You can even feature images and descriptions of the things that inspired your color crafty-ness.  I used these to link back into our collection and provided images of the works of art.  I’ll admit, it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be and it did cause me to pay more attention to the artist’s choices. 

Is anyone else up to the challenge?

I’d love to see some other posts from people using their favorite works of art as inspiration for new color palettes.  Feel free to use works from IMA’s Collection if you like, or just show us something that inspires you!

Best part? I pulled out some colors that had not been cataloged by the system yet.  So I got to name them!  Say hello to Egungun Red and Egungun Gold, Red Shirt and Homer Sky!  Ok, the last one wasn’t all that original, can you do better? Post your’s in the comments and show us what colors really stand out for you!

Artist Homer, Winslow
Title: The Boat Builders
Creation date 1873
Materials oil on panel
Dimensions 6 x 10 1/4 in. 13 3/4 x 17 3/4 in. (framed)

Palette Boat Builders
Culture or people Yoruba people
Title Egungun masquerade costume
Creation date 1901-1990
Materials cotton, beads
Dimensions L: 64 in.

Palette Egungun
Artist Scott, William Edouard
Title Rainy Night, Etaples
Creation date 1912
Materials oil on canvas
Dimensions 25 1/2 x 31 in. 33 x 39 1/4 in. (framed)

Palette Etaples
Artist Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de
TitleMoulin Rouge – La Goulue
Creation date 1891
Materials color lithograph
Dimensions 67 x 46 3/4 in.

Palette La Goulue
Creation date 701-800
Dynasty Tang dynasty
Title tomb guardian
Materials earthenware with lead glaze, ink, gold
Dimensions 42 1/8 x 19 x 9 (approx.) in.

Palette Tomb Guardian

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 7:36 am and is filed under New Media, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Rob Stein is a Chief Information Officer. Rob has written 14 articles for us.
 

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