l'atelier

In honor of St. Valentine, I am going to suggest a website for people who also love color, aptly named ColorLovers.com. If you like Adobe’s Kuler, ColorLovers is an even more joyful romp through the color wheel.

As with Kuler, you can search or browse through more than 1 million 5-color palettes, color swatches and (yes!) pattern; download them in a variety of formats; rate them; or become a member and upload your own faves. I enjoy the Forum, with discussions such as: “Lover’s Lounge”, “Showcase Your Work”, “Advice & Critique”, and “FAQ: Sharing the Love.”

There’s a section on color trends;as gleaned from current magazines and websites as well as posts on the ColorLovers blog describing the colors currently popular in everything from interior design to automobiles. It’s a handy resource for that, alone.

I love color! Whether it’s exploring the physics of color, the psychology of color, ethnic color preferences, I have a whole section of my bookshelf devoted to the subject. With ColorLovers.com I have found a resource that is handier to use. So far, I’ve managed to spend countless hours trading colors and patterns, reading the blogs and contributing to the discussions. I keep ColorLovers.com open in my browser in the background while working on a project so I can download and experiment with different color combinations.

If you love color, try out ColorLovers.com and spread the love.

This is the second part of a two-part tutorial on creating a repeat pattern. This (much shorter) part explores using the Color Editor features of Illustrator CS3 or CS4 to change the colorway of a pattern swatch. Defining a pattern is covered in Part 1 of this tutorial.

Defining a pattern has been a part of Illustrator for many, many versions, however Color Editing is only available in more recent versions, starting with CS3. If you want to skip Part 1 and move right into color editing with the pattern swatch used for this exercise, it can be downloaded and installed as follows:

Un-zip the downloaded file

Move the file japanese_04b.ai to the Applications folder (or Program Files directory for Windows):

Adobe Illustrator CS3 (or CS4) > Presets > en_US > Swatches > Patterns > Decorative

Quit and restart Illustrator

Note: The colorizing techniques using Color Edit can be used with any pattern.

Open a new document (print or web)

Insert the pattern japanese_04b into a Swatches panel by clicking on the upper right corner of the panel (A) to reveal a flyout menu of options for this panel. Select Open Swatch Library (B), the choose Patterns (C), then Decorative (D), and finally the swatch file japanese_04b.

This will open a new swatches panel with the color swatches and pattern swatch.

With the Rectangle Tool, draw a box.

For the fill color, select the pattern from the Swatches panel.

With the Selection Tool, select the filled box.

Open the Color Guide panel (A) and click on the color wheel icon at the bottom of the panel (B) to open the Recolor Artwork dialogue box.

In the Recolor Artwork dialogue box, click the Edit button (A) to reveal the Color Editor.

The link icon (B) should be ‘connected’ to preserve the same color harmony relationship. If you want to experiment with other relationships, you can ‘unlink’.

To see the results of your color choices, be sure Recolor Artwork (C) is checked.

Rotate the Active Colors (D) by clicking on one of the circles and dragging it around the color wheel to test various hues. You can also change the value by pulling the Active Color toward or away from the center of the color wheel.

Once you have chosen a new colorway, give it a name (E) and create a new group (F).

Click OK to close the Color Editor.

This will result in a new color group and a new pattern swatch being added to your Swatches panel.

A complete explanation of the Color Editor can be found in the Adobe Illustrator help file:

Victor. Digital illustration. © 2008, Cynthia M. Henchell. All rights reserved.

I’ve had these images in my head for years and just now have gotten the time to develop them enough to be able to add them to my portfolio of digital illustration. Some are more “finished” than others and a couple still qualify as “sketches” I keep revising them.

What is the madness behind the unusual theme? I wanted to capture some of the feeling of San Francisco and the community of Locke in the Sacramento River delta from a time when Chinese immigrants were still trying to adapt to their new surroundings. Relationships with the outside world were complicated and at the same time, this society was itself torn between the new world and the old world. There are more to come but I decided to let these first few out.

In general, I’m not in love with the Polaroid transfer look since it’s such a clich´, but I tried it with Victor and kept it for the cyanotone contrast to the montaged hand-tinted sepia-tones.

The (glic´e) printed sizes are small (about 5″ to 7″ wide) and meant to be a series of miniatures, not too different than Smith portraits or snapshots from the period. I have them in oversized mattes. View others in the series.