Author: Don

/ Don

Les Couleurs

271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book

In 1692 an artist known only as “A. Boogert” sat down to write a book in Dutch about mixing watercolors. Not only would he begin the book with a bit about the use of color in painting, but would go on to explain how to create certain hues and change the tone by adding one, two, or three parts of water. The premise sounds simple enough, but the final product is almost unfathomable in its detail and scope.

Spanning nearly 800 completely handwritten (and painted) pages, Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau (Treaty of colors used to paint water), was probably the most comprehensive guide to paint and color of its time. According to Medieval book historianErik Kwakkel who translated part of the introduction, the color book was intended as an educational guide. The irony being there was only a single copy that was probably seen by very few eyes.

It’s hard not to compare the hundreds of pages of color to its contemporary equivalent, the Pantone Color Guide, which wouldn’t be published for the first time until 1963.

The book is currently kept at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, France.

(via This is Colossal)

/ Don

Klaus Leidorf, Aerial Photography

Perched at the window of his Cessna 172, photographer Klaus Leidorf crisscrosses the skies above Germany while capturing images of farms, cities, industrial sites, and whatever else he discovers along his flight path, a process he refers to as “aerial archaeology.” Collectively the photos present a fascinating study of landscapes transformed by the hands of people—sometimes beautiful, sometimes frightening. Since the late 1980s Leidorf has shot thousands upon thousands of aerial photographs and currently relies on the image-stabilization technology in his Canon EOS 5D Mark III which is able to capture the detail of single tennis ball as it flies across a court. You can explore over a decade of Leidorf’s photography at much greater reslution over on Flickr. All images courtesy the artist.

(via This Is Colossal)

Category: Pix
/ Don

WPNewsman Full Text Newsletters

WPNewsman

If you’re looking for a free newsletter tool for your installation of WordPress and have less than 2,000 subscribers, the WPNewsman plug-in is fairly nice. They allow you to style your newsletters, entering shortcodes for post-specific content, as well as the post entries and separators. Once finished, you have the option of selecting by author, category, and date range, and creating a newsletter to use excerpts, fancy excerpts (which includes html), and full post content. Unfortunately, the full post content turns HTML into text and removes paragraph breaks, leaving one giant mass of text and html code, commingled. Read more

/ Don

2013 was (auto) awesome!

Google Plus has been auto-awesoming photos for a while, meaning that they’ve stitched together images with similar composition into animated gifs. See my cover photo with Banksy, for example. 

Well I was excited to see that they also auto-awesomed some photos from my 2013 to create this cute little video. Log-in to your Google Plus to see your version of 2013, auto-awesomed. 

Featured in this video are (in order of appearance): Me, Sara Higgins, Tara Fournier, Tim Jones, Drew Higgins, Jim Higgins, Lorie Higgins, My fourth grade class at Langtree Elementary School, Aidan Dunfey, Sarah Greer-Pennington, Greg Rogers, Alicia Samfilippo, Audra Fournier, Dennis Duffy (Dean Winters), Simona Rodano, Luigi Rosa, Mike Citarella, Angie Melvin, Sarah Roddis-Martin, Jacqué Citarella, Giammario Piumatti, Francesco Piumatti, Lauren Citarella, Steve Farjam, Sue Fleming Citarella, Jeff Arcara, Agnetta Citarella, Allie Citarella, Jules Feiffer, Frank DeGrazia, Katie Bacus, Thompson, and Ian Warner.