Adrien Gary Lucca, colour mixing and separation

Regarding the upcoming project, on reprographic process. "Adrien Gary Lucca is currently researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands. He creates large-scale paint drawings which confront mathematics, geometry, forms and colours. For the colour studies, he has developed a personal colour mixing methodology inspired by the 19^th-century research of Georges Seurat. The second series of works may seem like grey charts, or scales of brightness. Black paint lines are carefully quantified inside bi-dimensional forms (circles or squares); the contrast between the white colour of the paper and the black paint varies from a minimum to a maximum point. These studies are models for future large-format wall drawings that will interact with the lighting like custom in-situ filters." Quoted from — and via — We Find Wildness.

Two Colour for Seven Colour

An invitation card by Duncan Hamilton for an exhibition by Sarah Crowner of Dexter Sinister. Under his working name, The Uses of Literacy, he designs, publishes, workshops and lectures. Explore the non-hierarchical index for his span of interests and actions. In terms of independent publishing, his use of the Riso and Ricoh digital duplicators, is very interesting. A build-up of solid and halftone colour with overprinting, passing the card back through the machine with changes of colour cartridge (see sequence here), arrived at the result which cites Max Bill's classic cover design for Johannes Itten's Die Farbe (via Reference Library).

Two Colour Possibles

A detail from Andreas Samuelsson's limited-run screenprinted poster for If You Could, HudsonBec's ongoing publishing project. Always solely using red and black. Each illustrator takes on the constraint in a way that fits their method and aesthetic. Mr. Samuelsson is 100% on both colours, with a signature use of the paper-white as positive form.



A detail from Luke's poster shows him exploiting halftones in the black jutted up against 100% red to achieve something close to the gamut of marks he makes in other work.

Jour et Nuit

Typographer Pierre di Sciullo's Jour et Nuit. As succinct a manifestation I can find of RGB (additive) and CMYK (subtractive) colour. Play it here.




Significant too that in both cases the full 'saturation' of all colours fall as the counterform (the negative space within a letterform), a determinate factor in the design and signature-recognition of any form.



This, in turn, best illustrated by Emil Ruder in his seminal Typographie (1967).

Seeing Sound

Mary Ellen Bute's Tarantella (1940). Blue and Red for Black. Then Red and Magenta for Redmagenta. Using illuminated coloured acetates or gels it seems, for subtractive colour.



Note the richness gained by reversing out to white from a coloured background, counterpointed by colour on a white background.



The mis-registrations leading to a 'black' and a white on the edge of the diagonal rectangles may or may not have been deliberate but they offer object-volume.



And the exchange between hand-liquid and geo-stable line or form.