Here is a link to all of our art lighting finished in WHITE POWDER COAT FINISH –
Monochrome Painting and Grey Colors
A painting in monochrome or sepia can bring atmosphere and drama to a painting. But contrary to belief, a choice of colors can be used to achieve interesting lights and darks as opposed to reaching black and white paint. But what pigments can be used for a monochrome study?
Colors that Make up Black
Painting in Monochrome
Black can be createde by mixing all three primary colors magenta, yellow and cyan in equal measure. In pigments the colors permanent rose, pthalo blue and cadmium yellow (pale) closely resemble the colors used in printing ink. But other pigments can be used to produce a multitude of blacks and darks that using premixed black alone cannot achieve. Types of Black in Paint
There are several black pigments that are available from art shops, including ivory black, lamp black, mars black and perylene black. Dark grey colors can be used such as Payne’s grey, Davy’s grey and charcoal grey. Some blacks are slightly warmer or cooler than others, which indicate differentiation in color bias between the three primary colors.
But extra bias can be sought by adding another color to the black. Alizarin crimson and lamp black for instance results in a hot, sooty black that might be ideal for expressing the black embers of a furnace. Add a little ultramarine or cobalt blue, and the black will take on a blue-grey bias which might be used to suggest the bases of moonlit clouds.
White Pigment in Painting
Again, various white pigments can be found, such as titanium white, flake white, zinc white and lead white. Flake white is a little translucent and is often used for underpainting. Titanium is the most opaque of all and is therefore the white I use most often. Various greys such as Paynes’ grey, Davy’s grey and charcoal grey can be used if a particular grey is required throughout the painting.
A Black and White Square: the ‘Zero Degree’ of Painting
The color black is the first pigment used by human beings and artists in Prehistory, made from a mixture of charcoal and iron; it was the beginning, but it also symbolically represented the end.
Of course, it is a visually striking color, but already from the word it is easy to discover something more about its symbolic meaning. In Latin, the word black was ater, the etymological root of terms like atrocious or atrocity. In fact, it already implied all the negative moral qualities often associated with this intense color. Numerous cultures associate black with death, mourning, darkness, and the artistic iconography itself used it to represent the devil, especially in medieval paintings.
But black is also much more than this! Appreciated for its mysterious and elegant qualities, it is thanks to black and white abstract painting that it has also taken on more conceptual meaning.
The most striking and emblematic case is that of the Russian Kazimir Malevich, who in 1915 painted a black square on a white background. Simple, paradoxical, but at the same time radical. Who knows how many viewers were peeved, looking at it, how many will have wondered if the artist was serious about hanging this black square in an exhibition? Malevich used black color and geometry to bring attention to the zero degrees of painting. His painting technique pointed out that there was no longer interest in external reality or figuration, but only in sensitivity and spiritual meaning. The color was no longer the medium for understanding an artwork, but it became the expression of a surface in which visible and invisible coexisted.
We must not confuse this iconic Malevich’s Black Square, but also the equally famous White on White square, with an attempt to obtain a cold and rational black or white painting. The Russian painter lets you glimpse the touches of his brush, his craftsmanship, his human presence. The black square is a nihilistic icon that resets art as it was known before, but at the same time, it wants to start from there, with a new vision. Famous American Minimalists, like Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt but also other black and white and monochrome abstract art masters like Joseph Albers, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, cannot ignore this first revolutionary example. What you see is exactly what you see with the use of black and white painting, but we must not forget that even black and white are never truly neutral colors; they are not a pure thing, but always painted and connoted in some way through the lens of humans and artists.
The Incredible Story of Anish Kapoor’s Vantablack
You know, contemporary art is full of contradictions, controversies, provocations, and stories that sometimes stretch the limits of believability. That of the Vantablack and its owner, the contemporary British Indian artist Anish Kapoor, is one of them and it precisely concerns the color black. But not just any black, the blackest black of the world!
Everything happened in 2014 when the English company Surrey NanoSystems produced a black pigment called Vantablack, promoted as the darkest black ever created, Vantablack absorbed 99.965% of visible light. It was initially conceived for engineering purposes, but Kapoor soon grasped its potential in the visual arts, deciding not only to use it in his installations but also to ask the corporate for its exclusive rights. In summary, no artist could have made use of this incredible and ultra-mat shade of black and only Kapoor can exploit its aesthetic qualities – flat, visceral, dramatic, it seems the exemplification of a black hole or the great void.
The significance of this controversial gesture has other examples in the history of contemporary arts, starting with the famous blue patented by Yves Klein, but at the same time, it left the other colleagues of the art domain shocked. One in particular: the British artist Stuart Semple, to defiance of the exclusivity of Vantablack, has decided to develop an equally special pigment: the ‘pinkest pink’. Available to everyone on the market . except for Anish Kapoor!
Black, White and Grayscale Artworks
We analyzed specific black or white iconic paintings, but we did not raise the issue of black and white and grayscale techniques yet. Why should artists choose to eliminate colors from the palette of their works of art? And why is the use of black and white so fascinating and symbolic?
The monochrome grey technique has ancient roots; the use of grisaille paintings was already frequent in the Middle Ages, especially in religious paintings, with the aim of not distracting the attention of the devotees from the godly subject using bright, captivating colors. In this way, black and white were interpreted as neutral and rigorous colors, already associated with spiritual symbolism. Subsequently, black and white paintings became a useful choice to better study the pictorial composition: the arrangement and intensity of shadows, lights, and chiaroscuro, black and white art was frequently used in painting but also photography.
It is in fact with the advent of photography that black and white has taken on an extraordinarily strong meaning.
The technique of monochrome photography is considered one of the most interpretive and accurate, and it was also important for contemporary arts.
Andy Warhol’s Black and White Paintings series (1985-86) is a prime example of that. The great master of pop aesthetic produced hand-painted images of everyday goods in black-and-white, extrapolated mostly from advertisements in the Daily News. It was not the first time that Warhol used black and white in pop: a flat, reproducible, industrial, and detached black. After all, the goal of his art was just that: no hidden meaning behind what you see. The impact of strong emotions can be filtered through the use of black and white and, at the same time, it can give an image of profound realism, as it happens in photographic reports.
Think of the masterpiece Guernica, by Pablo Picasso. Guernica is the manifesto of the horror of war, and his painter (and eyewitness of the massacre) through the choice of black and white painting wanted to refer precisely to the reportages of the newspapers of the time which were, in fact, in black and white. Black and white is no sentimentality, but it communicates truth, at the same time.
However, black and white can have also a strong, physical, powerful potential, especially in abstract art. Jackson Pollock’s black pouring is an example of this tendency; this series appears as a more graphic synthesis compared to the master’s famous colorful paintings but at the same time a black and white painting full of the same energy and action of yellow, red, or blue best-known artworks.
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You need to break the hex code into 3 pieces to get the individual red, green, and blue intensities. Each 2 digits of the code represent a value in hexadecimal (base-16) notation. I won’t get into the details of the conversion here, they’re easy to look up.
Once you have the intensities for the individual colors, you can determine the overall intensity of the color and choose the corresponding text.
if (red*0.299 + green*0.587 + blue*0.114) > 186 use #000000 else use #ffffff The threshold of 186 is based on theory, but can be adjusted to taste. Based on the comments below a threshold of 150 may work better for you.
Edit: The above is simple and works reasonably well, and seems to have good acceptance here at StackOverflow. However, one of the comments below shows it can lead to non-compliance with W3C guidelines in some circumstances. Herewith I derive a modified form that always chooses the highest contrast based on the guidelines. If you don’t need to conform to W3C rules then I’d stick with the simpler formula above. For an interesting look into the problems with this see Contrast Ratio Math and Related Visual Issues.
The formula given for contrast in the W3C Recommendations (WCAG 2.0) is (L1 + 0.05) / (L2 + 0.05) , where L1 is the luminance of the lightest color and L2 is the luminance of the darkest on a scale of 0.0-1.0. The luminance of black is 0.0 and white is 1.0, so substituting those values lets you determine the one with the highest contrast. If the contrast for black is greater than the contrast for white, use black, otherwise use white. Given the luminance of the color you’re testing as L the test becomes:
if (L + 0.05) / (0.0 + 0.05) > (1.0 + 0.05) / (L + 0.05) use #000000 else use #ffffff This simplifies down algebraically to:
if L > sqrt(1.05 * 0.05) - 0.05 if L > 0.179 use #000000 else use #ffffff The only thing left is to compute L . That formula is also given in the guidelines and it looks like the conversion from sRGB to linear RGB followed by the ITU-R recommendation BT.709 for luminance.
for each c in r,g,b: c = c / 255.0 if c The threshold of 0.179 should not be changed since it is tied to the W3C guidelines. If you find the results not to your liking, try the simpler formula above.
