Issue 0007

Written By G C
From the Editor

After the less-productive previous month, July has been especially packed. Despite my ongoing issues with sleep, I've been working hard to catch up on things, and I've managed to get at least partway there. Unfortunately, I'll now have to get ahead in the coming weeks, because a whole slew of things are coming up in the latter half of August.

The most important of which will be that I'm scheduled for a medical procedure that I have been given very little information on. Don't worry, I'm not dying at any rate quicker than one second per second and it's not a critical procedure. But from what I've read online, the estimated recovery time is about 6-8 weeks. Whilst I don't expect to be completely incapacitated, there is likely going to be a decrease in the amount of work I'm able to do. So a preemptive apology for getting rewards out late, both physical and digital. Hopefully I will have some things banked up though and it won't be too much of a disruption.

Of course, I will continue to give updates once I know more. In the meantime, I hope that you all remain awesome, and take good care of yourselves.

Art Fundamentals

I was asked a while ago why mixing colours in Procreate (or any digital painting app) doesn't work the same way that mixing real paint does. In the previous issue of this newsletter, I gave a super high-level overview of primary colours in different colour models, which is a part of the explanation. But there's a lot more to it than additive or subtractive colour models.

So why can't I mix blue and yellow to get green in Procreate? And why can't I just switch to CMYK?

Let's take a step back and once again think about what colour actually is. Obviously I don't have enough time to go into all of the physics, nor do I know even remotely enough to do so, but we don't need to go that deep. You may recall from high-school physics class that white light (natural light from the Sun) is a spectrum, from the infrared to the ultraviolet. We can actually see all of these wavelengths when the light passes through a prism. You know, a rainbow, or that Pink Floyd album cover. Every object absorbs and scatters some combination of the wavelengths of light. The scattered light is what gets bounced into our eyeballs, and what we end up perceiving as the colour of the object.

"I'M A PARTICLE WHEE!"

Depending on the absorption and scatter rates of the object, it will appear a different colour. And yet, if you think about it, a glob of paint is actually made up of a whole bunch of particles. Each of those particles absorbs and scatters differently, and it's actually the combined effect that we see and determine to be the colour of the paint. This makes sense if you think about the idea of mixing blue and yellow paints. If you just have the paint globs side by side, it will just look like blue and yellow. But once you start mixing it, and the more you mix it, it looks more and more green.

Ray of light bouncing off blue and yellow paint particles

Yet this doesn't work in the digital realm, primarily because of the fact that computers work in the additive model of RGB as described before, but also because they are combining the colours in a linear manner. It turns out that this isn't what happens in real life, and linearly adding the absorption and scatter rates of two different colours to get what we actually see. There's a whole bunch of 😱 MATHS 😱 involved further, but I won't go into that here. Suffice it to say that most digital painting apps don't take this into account and essentially just do a 1-to-1 combination of the colours, and you can actually see that blue and yellow don't make green, but a weird greyish (me?) somewhere in between.

Linear mixing of yellow + blue

And if that wasn't enough, it gets even trickier still: pigments don’t strictly follow the subtractive model like we’d think. And this is because of opacity and transparency (which is a whole topic in and of itself).

Think about the physical glob of paint again. The more paint there is, the more opaque it will be. The less there is, the more transparent. Not just that, but paints inherently have a different level of transparency, depending on what they’re made of. This is yet another topic that I may cover later, but you might have heard of binders or mediums. These are the materials used to actually make paint…well, a paint. Water is obviously a common medium, but there are also a variety of others. And just like how different substances will affect the refraction or reflection of light, this affects the transparency of the paint. This is also why certain mediums and materials are best suited together to get the best effect. Of course, this will always still differ, which is another reason it's best to always swatch new mediums on different materials.

Winsor & Newton 24 half-pan artists' watercolour set

Notice how some of the pure watercolours look black in the pan, but are actually not when actually painted on paper.

Once again, all of this is a very, very high-level and simplified explanation of it all. There are literally entire fields of study around colour, and I barely even know how to do my own paint mixing very well, so take all of this with the appropriate grains of salty pigment.

A lot of the information here has been referenced from our good ol' pal Wikipedia, as well as the paper Practical Pigment Mixing for Digital Painting that I actually shared previously. Here's a video that explains all of this by the creators of MixBox, the pigment mixing engine implemented in Rebelle. Or if you really wanna get into the details, their talk from SIGGRAPH goes more in-depth, including the 😨 MATHS. (Full disclosure, I haven't fully absorbed this one myself yet. Discrete maths was and continues to be one of my worst subjects lol.)

Books and Reads

Current Reads

📕 Contagious: How to Build Word of Mouth in the Digital Age - Jonah Berger

Another attempt at going through the unread books in my bookcase before buying anything new (although, that was actually a failure...more on that elsewhere), and honestly I didn't even remember buying this one. I'm sure it was recommended by a colleague or something whilst I was employed. Despite this, I've actually been finding it a pretty decent read (especially compared to my previous non-fiction--see below).

Much like with pretty much all non-fiction these days, none of the information is new, but I appreciate the fact that the author has actually done studies on the concepts he talks about. This may be one of those rare books where I actually come away with a few tangible actions that I want to try out.

📘 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

I'm not one for dystopian fiction, especially after being essentially scarred from being forced to read 1984 in high school. But on a trip to the big town and the big library, I spotted this really nice copy of this one (it has a ribbon bookmark!) and figured, why the hell not. I should expand my horizons and be cultured and all that. Besides that, I've read that this is actually closer to the current state of the world more than that of Big Brother in 1984, so that got me curious.

I'm only a few chapters in so far, and may have plunged into the cold deep end too quickly, especially coming from some of the other books I've been reading lately. The dystopia sure is...dystopian. I can already see how it does seem to apply to us in the present day, though, especially with respect to our capitalistic society.

Recently Finished

📗 Start With Why - Simon Sinek 2/5

I've mentioned before that I rarely rate books less than 3. This one was an utter slog to get through. It was a classic case of an author turning what was essentially a 10-minute TED talk (literally) into an entire book. Even a blog post would have sufficed for this, not 200+ pages worth of a book. The only thing I got out of it beyond the core message was the author's 'why', which I actually think I might steal (like an artist lol):

To inspire people to do the things that inspire them so that, together, we can change our world.
— Simon Sinek

Articles, Blogs, & Papers

Total Tangents

Podcasts

If there was any doubt on why I love Ologies so much, it should be cleared just from the last four episodes this past month, starting with... C H E E S E. That's right, Fromology, the study of cheese. Then there's a two-parter on Obsessive-Compulsive Neurobiology. OCD has a lot of overlaps with other common conditions like anxiety, depression, and more, and this episode plus the bonus help clear up many of the insidious misconceptions in society about the disorder. (Spoiler: no, someone who is extra neat and tidy doesn't necessarily have OCD.) Then lastly, in another one of the I-never-knew-this-was-a-thing-but-now-I-love-it topics, Literary Olfactology has all sorts of weird and fascinating facts about the importance of smell in culture, particularly in literature.

Jumping from our noses to our ears, 20K Hz is a podcast all about sounds, from the obvious to the more obscure. This episode falls into the latter category, where they discuss possibly the most often-used four notes in (Western) musical history: The Dies Irae. Once you hear it, you will start hearing it everywhere. The great thing about this podcast for you audiophiles is that, because it's literally all about sounds, the production is extremely high-quality. In fact, many of the episodes are actually best listened in stereo or headphones.

When I first started getting into podcasts back in the day, a lot of the more well-known ones were where I started. Whilst going through my never-ending queue, I saw a couple that I'd added from 99% Invisible that I'd never actually gotten around to listening to. And boy were they doozies. Firstly, of course I had to listen to the Tale of the Jackalope, because...well. But seriously, who'd have thought that (allegedly) horned bunnies played a major part in finding the vaccine for HPV?! Definitely not me. Secondly, this episode on the censor bleep tone got me thinking... I should really get back to video editing lol.

Videos

Thank You!

I'd love to hear from you!

If you'd like to write in to us, please leave a comment or send a message with any future topic ideas, favourite reads, recommended videos or articles, and even some creatives you feel I might like! I am considering a Features column in upcoming editions and would love to discover new people outside of my usual circles!

G C
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