Spot Color

I decided I'd take a delightful break from my normal soapbox in order to encourage you to explore a relatively simple kind of art, spot coloring. All you really need is an inspiring black and white photograph. While this may be sometimes difficult to come by at times, remember you can always cheat a little by making a color photograph into black and white greyscale with the click of a digital button.

Most image manipulation software today comes with the quick click to "Convert to Black & White" or "Convert to GreyScale". Some programs offer a little more sophistication in that you can mask out a part of the image and just convert that part. Or invert the mask and convert everything but that which you masked out. This can be a fun exploration in itself, masking and unmasking to create a checkboard pattern of color and grey amidst a field of fruit and vegetables.

But we are here with purpose. Spot coloring a photograph is generally meant to draw our attention to a particular element of the picture. Gatorade uses this idea in its commercials to draw our attention to various liquids in the image area to promote their product. If you remember seeing the movie or the commercials for the movie of Pleasantville, you'll remember that they slowly colorized a black and white world. Color in this case is equal to the excitement of change and things new.

The first thing that I did in trying to find and make a meaningful black and white photograph was to search my house for cluttered or packed areas. The clutter is my junk, while the packed areas are my wife's organization of her mounds of stuff. In the end I chose organization to clutter so that when looking at the finished piece as a whole, the viewer can search the rest of the image see what has not been emphasized with color.

"The Only Thing I Ever Got Her"




What you see in the picture here is shelves of figurines, dolls, and knickknacks that have been collected over time. The actuality of what you see is gifts from family and friends received over the years. The fiction of what you see is the emphasis. I've looked at the shelves and image long enough to decide that one thing doesn't go along with the same vein as everything else, a Metal Rose. It stands to searve in this image as a cold reminder of undying love. That it will not wilt or change is contrary to the dynamic growth that usually goes with a relationship; it simply is.

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