Procedural Color - Introduction



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For the last year or so, I’ve been slowly learning more about using color in art and, in particular, trying to learn how to procedurally generate and use interesting color combinations. My goal was to achieve generative colors, where the program surprises me with color combinations rather than me having to hand-pick palettes.

So I kept taking notes along the way, I wrote code, I refactored it, and started slowly writing up an article summarizing what I had learnt. However, over time, the scope of this thing got completely out of hand to the point where it became a chore to keep writing. So instead, I’ve decided to break my ideas down into smaller pieces and publish them as individual articles. I’ll leave this intro here as a sort of table of contents.

Let’s begin!

Color is a pretty vast subject and can get very complex really fast. Over the last year, I’ve been trying to learn more about it from the perspective of generative/procedural art, and this series of posts is a compilation of some of the stuff I’ve learnt.

If you’re a generative or procedural artist, my hope is that by following along, you end up with a few more options available to you with regard to color than the usual randomly-generated RGB colors.

As I said before, this series has been a long time in the making and is based on my own journey exploring this topic. If there’s anything I’ve learnt along the way it’s that every rule can be happily broken while still producing incredible work, and I heartily encourage you to do so! However, for those who want a more structured approach to getting to grips with a topic as complex as color, my hope is that the ideas presented here serve as stepping stones for you to build upon.

Finally, everything I’ve presented below is nothing but the tiniest speck on the very tip of a very large iceberg. There is a huge community of artists and researchers working on just understanding how we percieve and react to color and it’s impossible to provide an exhaustive perspective of the area in one article. I’ve tried to keep things at an introductory level and deliberately stuck to the HSB and RGB colorspaces as these are widely accessible via generative toolkits like Processing.

Articles in the Series

Creating Color Variations: In the first part, we’ll look at how to produce variations of a given base color, which is useful to just understand the basic levers that are available to us when it comes to procedural color, and how they work.

HSB vs. RYB: In the second part, we’ll look at the difference between the HSB color wheel and the traditional RYB color wheel used by artists. I show two approaches for converting from RYB hues to HSB hues.

Monochrome Color Schemes: In this article, we’ll look at monochromatic color schemes and how we can use them programmatically. More specifically, I go into detail on color values and why they matter, as well as how we can procedurally generate value scales.

Value/Tonal Keys: In this article, we’ll look at how we can use subsets of value scales, or value keys, to be more deliberate in our choice of values, and open up space for other elements of our artwork.

More articles coming soon as I write/edit them…