In The Mod: Color Analytics

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Dr. Woohoo’s new blog.

I am in a great place creatively – outputting an incredible amount of artwork lately using a wide range of techniques, in a variety of different formats on all different types of substrates. During this process, I have tapped more and more into 3rd party services that can either create and/or distribute the artwork by laser-cutting/etching it from companies like Ponoko; or that can create my tools like laser-etched wood-cutting blocks and rubber stamps; to DIY book manufacturers like Blurb; my artwork on minicards, stickers postcards, greeting cards, and NoteCards via Moo; and finally screen-printing, local cnc-milling and glass-casting companies.

Because of all this activity I don’t believe my previous website would not be able to accommodate it well – along with other usability issues – so I decided to redo it. During my research phase for the new site, it had been a long time since I looked closely at WordPress, so I gave it another peak and I was surprised by how well I could integrate all of my creative endeavors.

Makes sense so far… update the website using WordPress so that it’s easier to manage, has better usability, etc. etc. But what about my other 2 blogs: In The Mod & bps (brushes.paints.stencils.)? After going back and forth on this… I’ve decided to combine them all into the new blog. I will create a new tag for each one in case you only want to follow updates in those categories.

Now it’s time to get back to creating… thanks for tuning in.
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Woohoo!
Drew

Baby Tattooville, Oct. 3-5, 2008, Mission Inn and Spa, Riverside, CA

Some of my favorite artists will be featured this year including Ana Bagayan, Glenn Barr, Dave Cooper, Bob Dob, Joe Ledbetter, Brandi Milne, Daniel Peacock, Shag, Amy Sol and Michael Whelan.

Baby Tattooville provides a unique opportunity for a small group of celebrated artists and serious collectors to spend time together in a relaxed yet creatively stimulating environment. Without the time constraints of a typical personal appearance, or the crowd control issues of a standing-room-only event, artists and collectors will have a weekend-long opportunity to discuss and explore their mutual interests. Original work will be created and celebrated around-the-clock. No one will leave empty handed. Only 50 event packages are being offered. www.babytattooville.com

In addition, there will be an art show, Beyond Baby Tattooville, being held in conjunction with Baby Tattooville. It will include works from this and last year’s featured artists and include a reception on Oct. 4, 2008 at the Riverside Art Museum.

If you’re interested, you better hurry because the last time I checked, there was only 16 more slots open for registration!

From Mark Chervinsky: “The Sophisticated Misfit is a long-awaited must-have for fans of Shag and Tiki fan alike. The 65 minute documentary traces the artist’s roots growing up in Hawaii, his artistic journey in college, his early work designing album covers, to his modern day role as an art-world phenom. In addition to exclusive footage of Shag painting in his home studio, the film features intimate interviews with the artist, his family, artistic influences, tiki-files, celebrity collectors and fans.

Special features include a demonstration by Shag’s silk-screener of the creation of the Well Hung print, and a tour of fellow Orange County artist and Shag collaborator Paul Frank’s workshop. With a soundtrack featuring the music of the Dynatones, Clouseaux, and Shag’s former band, the Tiki Tones, The Sophisticated Misfit would be a welcome addition to every Shag fan’s collection.”

On a personal note, I love Shag. When I was living in San Diego in 2000, Paté and I painted two walls in my living room purple with lighter purple faux-stones and the other two lime-green to compliment the Shag prints. Woohoo!

Available at
www.smee.tv

Looking for beautiful colors? Dr. Woohoo gives you three new color tools to create instant palettes: Search Flickr. Capture images with your WebCam. Or drag-n-drop images from your computer. Just click a magic button, and the colors are saved to Illustrator, Photoshop or as an XML file for Processing.

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He’s been called a freaky genius, and yes, it can be hard to follow the color analytic and visualization concepts when Dr. Woohoo is describing the next version of In The Mod (ITM). But it’s his artist spirit that drives him to sculpt the long streams of code that convert abstract thoughts into practical color applications, tools that liberate artists to realize their vision.

ITM (In The Mod) allows digital artists and designers to create instant color palettes of one-to-thousands of colors from a variety of sources — Flickr, your WebCam, images on your computer, or choose from a collection of (in)famous paintings — to use in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator CS3 or Processing.

Dr. Woohoo recalls the geneses for each of his four ITM editions:

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ITM: WebCam in action from dr woohoo on Vimeo.

ITM: WebCam Edition
When I first began the quest to find beautiful color palettes, one of the original objectives was to capture colors as quickly as possible so as not to disrupt the fleeting creative process. One day I was in my office inspired by the colors of my red t-shirt and smoky gray pants and I wanted to capture them right away and begin to design with them without having to take a picture, transfer it to my hard drive, ahhhh! lol. With the ITM: WebCam Edition, you can capture one-to-thousands of colors from your webcam directly into this app and save them as Swatches for Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator CS3 or as an XML file for Processing.
More Info | Buy Now | Try Now | FAQ

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ITM: Your Images Edition in action from dr woohoo on Vimeo.

ITM: Your Images Edition
I was on a road trip in northern New Mexico with my daughter as the sun began to lift over fields filled with tall cream-colored grass and purple haze hills. My daughter snapped a photo and then, boom! it hit me; There must be a way to transform the beautiful colors that surround us every day into a digital color palette. That led to creating ITM, Your Images Edition, which allows you to drag-n-drop an image into the app and extract one-to-thousands of colors into Swatches for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator CS3 or Processing.
More Info | Buy Now | Try Now | FAQ

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ITM: Flickr Edition in action from dr woohoo on Vimeo.

ITM: Flickr Edition
How can you not be inspired by the tribal energy of Flickr’s global photo gallery — it is a playground of color palettes. While I was creating a version of ITM that brought the website directly into Adobe Illustrator, I knew I had to connect the dots! That led me to the brilliant programmer Kelvin Luck — the developer of Flashr, a tool that allows Flash files to communicate with Flickr. We combined it with ITM to search and retrieve Flickr images and extract one-to-thousands of colors into Swatches for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator CS3 or Processing.
More Info | Coming Soon!

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The ITM: Online Edition
While creating Brushes.Paints.Stencils. — a painting application that emulates natural media — my creative flow was interrupted each time I integrated a new color palette. While traditional painters mix-n-match colors in a natural rhythm, the computer task is laborious and right brain. The epiphany struck me as I stood in front of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting: I visualized extracting every point of the canvas and its associated color and then I tried to organize them based on their hue, saturation or brightness and all of the colors fell to the ground in disarray. That fueled ITM: Online Edition, which allows you to search its database by the artist’s name, view the painting and a visualization of the extracted colors and save the colors into Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator CS3 or Processing.
Try Now

Made proudly on a Mac using Adobe Flex Builder, AIR, SwitchBoard and the entire Adobe Creative Suite.

Robert Rauschenberg past away last night at his home after he was recently treated for pneumonia…

Years ago, I remember looking at the clock as I printed out thumbnail size images of Robert’s paintings, and laughing at myself because it was past 3 am. I was inspired and beyond exhaustion, as I cut out the images of Rauschenberg’s beautiful paintings and collages. On my office wall – before it was covered with hundreds of copies of a portrait Picasso on the left and the other half covered with a portrait of Einstein – I had created a large matrix made out of thread and thumb tacks. Based on the results of two algorithms – one that defined the most import color of the image, the other that defined its location in a 2d color space – I manually placed hundreds of images in the matrix, on my wall. This allowed me to visually ‘walk-thru’ the code in order to see any anomalies that might need adjustment. This color visualization would later define the rules of how the colors are plotted on my site, In The Mod. To this day, those images are still up on my wall, inspiring me over and over.

Artist, philanthropist Robert Rauschenberg dead at 82, NBC2 News Online

Robert Rauschenberg, NYT article

Rauschenberg: Art and Photos

A conversation with artist Robert Rauschenberg - Charlie Rose

In The Mod: Rauschenberg’s Yoicks

Adobe Illustrator CS3 + Flickr + In The Mod mash-up from dr woohoo on Vimeo

What do you get when Dr. Woohoo mashes up Adobe Illustrator CS3, Flickr and In The Mod: Color Analytics? A free swf Panel that runs inside AI CS3 that allows you to search Flickr & In The Mod, view the colors from each image or painting you select and then save them directly to the Swatches Panel in AI.

Inspiration
The inspiration for the Flickr integration comes from a variety of sources – watching what Mario and Marcos did with Kelvin’s Flashr; looking at the photographs of the Ronin, Annie Liebowitz and Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir; and of course the colors we see all around us – in the orchids and the sunsets – whose combinations are simply perfect.

System Requirements
- Adobe Illustrator CS3
- Macs (OS X 10.4.10+) or PC
- Active internet connection.

Installation
- After unzipping the attached files, save them in your Adobe Illustrator CS3/Presets/Scripts/ directory and restart AI

Usage
- Before running the script (InTheMod_beta.jsx), either create a new document or open an existing document and be sure that your Swatches Panel is open. (Window Menu: Swatches)
- To run the script, select File: Scripts: InTheMod_beta

Flickr
This will launch a popup panel and loads the swf file. Enter a tag to search and retrieve images from Flickr. Select the thumbnail image you would view the color palettes for by clicking on the thumbnail icon. The scroll pane will slide over to make room for the visualization view. If you like the colors and want to add them to your AI Swatches Panel, click on the AI icon in the lower right corner. That’s it!

In The Mod
To access to all of the (in)famous paintings and color palettes on In The Mod, click on the ITM button on the main screen (that has scrollable thumbnails). The process of seeing the color visualization and saving the palettes is the same as above.

Sorting by Hue, Saturation or Brightness
After saving the colors to your Swatches panel, you can also sort them by Hue, Saturation or Brightness. To do so, there’s a trick: click on the open document window (so the focus is pulled off of the swf Panel) and then select from the menu File: Scripts: SortByHue-Sat-Bri. I prefer sorting by Brightness, so I typically enter ‘B’ in the popup prompt. The rest is magic.

Is it perfect? No, far from it. This is a beta and I have a long list of fixes and enhancements I would love to make when I have some spare time, but it is functional and it is extremely fun to use and I felt it was something worthy of sharing.

Download
AI CS3 + Flickr + ITM.

How-to Mix Colors like Picasso with Illustrator CS3 + In The Mod from dr woohoo on Vimeo

So you want to be able to learn from the masters and mix colors like Josef Albers, Picasso, Dali, O’Keeffe or several hundred other incredible artists? If you combine Adobe’s Illustrator (AI) CS3, color palettes from In The Mod and Live Color together you can! If you haven’t already done so and you have AI CS3, download an ASE file now from In The Mod. Here’s a link to Josef Alber’s Homage to Square-’White Enclave’. Click on Downloads and then Download the ASE Color Palette. Here are the steps on how-to mix colors like the masters:

1a) With AI CS3 open, a new document created, from the Swatch Panel, select the Swatch Libraries Menu.

1b) Scroll down to Other Library… and import your ITM ASE palette. In case you missed it, here’s more info here on ITM ASE color palettes. As you will see in the video, I like to keep all of the ASE color palettes in a single directly called ASE. From this directory I selected the Josef Albers-Homage to the Square-’White Enclave’.ase file.

A new Swatch Panel appears. Rather then replacing the existing Swatch Panel, this creates another Swatch Panel which *is not* directly associated with the active document. In order to take advantage of Live Color (similar to Live Paint), we need to transfer the color swatches to the main Swatch Panel. Before doing so, I prefer to delete the default swatches. Note: You can skip to the next step if you’ve already downloaded the RemoveAllSwatches script infrom the previous post.

To simplify this process, I created a script that automatically removes all of the swatches called RemoveAllSwatches. It will delete everything, with the exception of the 2 Group Folders, which, as far as I know can not be deleted via code at this time. You can download the RemoveAllSwatches script here. After unzipping it, I suggest moving it to the Adobe Illustrator CS3/Presets/Scripts directory so that the script is readily available the next time you launch AI.

2) With these scripts installed, I can now easily delete all of the swatches in the active document’s Swatch Panel by navigating to the menu File: Scripts: RemoveAllScripts. So Ok at the prompt and all of the swatches are deleted. As mentioned before, the Group Folders remain, so I simply select both and delete them.

3) In order to take full advantage of Live Color I need to transfer the swatches from the Swatch Panel I opened to the one that is now empty. Selecting all of the swatches by shift clicking on the first and last swatch, I then open the popup menu on the Swatch Panel and select Add to Swatches. Hopefully, either in a future version or until I figure out if it can be done here, we will be able to Add/Replace the swatches in the Swatches Panel for the active document in the same manner that we can do in Photoshop.

All of the swatches are then moved from my panel to the active documents Swatch Panel. Now comes the magic part.

4) Close the secondary Swatch Panel, leaving open the original Swatch Panel. With all of the swatches selected, create a new Color Group click on the icon on the bottom of the Swatch Panel that looks like a Folder with a ‘+’ symbol, officially called the New Color Group button. .

5) In place of the first swatch at the top-left of the Swatch Panel, you will now notice a folder. Double click on this folder and you will launch the Live Color window. This is the really fun part.

6) We are going to adjust all of the colors of the Swatch Panel, but before we do, we need to make sure that when we edit one color, all of the other colors will follow the leader. There is an icon that looks like a Link and/or a Chain. Roll over it and make sure it says ‘Unlink harmony colors’. If it does, then all of the colors are linked. If it doesn’t, select it now in order to link the colors to each other.

7) Now, with the shift key held down, click on any of the circles within the Color Wheel and rotate it’s position around. Doing so should rotate all of the other colors.

What you’re essentially doing is changing the Hue of all the colors and… [drum roll] mixing a new color palette using the same type of color relationships that the master painters would have used! That’s huge! And if that wasn’t enough, we just expanded the number of incredible color palettes you have available to you from In The Mod from several hundred to an infinite amount of variations, while maintaining the integrity and expertise of the masters. I’ve had dreams about this for several years and have several algorithms written in my moleskins, but I simply haven’t had the time to execute the idea… so I’m excited that the Illustrator team has, because I can focus on some other goodies and we can all benefit from this now.

Woohoo! I hope this is helpful.

Illustrator CS3 + In The Mod + Live Paint = Happiness from dr woohoo on Vimeo

The Live Paint Bucket is one of my favorite new tools in Illustrator CS3. Combined with the ASE palettes from either kuler and/or In The Mod (ITM) along with two scripts (SortByHue-Sat-Bri and RemoveAllSwatches), the Live Paint Bucket is fine-tuned to speed up the workflow of coloring your artwork and designs. In this video you can see the palettes, scripts and Live Paint Bucket in action. Here’s a play-by-play of what’s going on:

1a) From the Swatch Panel, select the Swatch Libraries Menu.

1b) Scroll down to Other Library… and import your ITM ASE palette. In case you missed it, here’s more info here on ITM ASE color palettes.

A new Swatch Panel appears. In order to take advantage of Live Paint, we need to transfer the color swatches to the main Swatch Panel. Before doing so, I prefer to delete the default swatches. To simplify this process, I created a script that automatically removes all of the swatches called RemoveAllSwatches. It will delete everything, with the exception of the 2 Group Folders, which, as far as I know can not be deleted via code at this time. You can download the RemoveAllSwatches script here. After unzipping it, I suggest moving it to the Adobe Illustrator CS3/Presets/Scripts directory so that the script is readily available the next time you launch AI.

While you’re at it, if you haven’t already done so, you might also want to download the handy sorting script I created for sorting your swatches by Hue, Saturation or Brightness. You can do so here. I would recommend installing it in the same directory as above.

2) With these scripts installed, I can now easily delete all of the swatches in the active document’s Swatch Panel by navigating to the menu File: Scripts: RemoveAllScripts. So Ok at the prompt and all of the swatches are deleted. As mentioned before, the Group Folders remain, so I simply select both and delete them.

3) In order to take full advantage of Live Paint I need to transfer the swatches from the Swatch Panel I opened to the one that is now empty. Selecting all of the swatches by shift clicking on the first and last swatch, I then open the popup menu on the Swatch Panel and select Add to Swatches.

All of the swatches are then moved from my panel to the active documents Swatch Panel. Now I can select my Live Paint Bucket and you’ll notice a special cursor with 3 color swatches above it. These colors correspond to the colors to active swatch as well as the two colors to the left and right of it, respectively. I can then toggle through the swatches by using the left and right arrow keys. Beautiful! The only thing I can think of that would make this tool better is if it had a total of 5 color swatches for the cursor, adding one to navigate up the Swatch Panel with the up arrow key and one to navigate down.

The color swatches from ITM are organized based on popularity – from left-to-right, top-to-bottom – meaning that the most popular colors in the particular painting the colors were sampled from are in the top-left corner, the least popular in the bottom-right of the Swatch Panel. To enhance working with color palettes from ITM and the Live Paint Bucket, being able to sort the colors by Hue, Saturation or Brightness becomes invaluable. To sort the Swatch Panel of the active document by Hue, Saturation or Brightness:

4) (Assuming you have downloaded and copied the SortByHue-Sat-Bri.jsx file to the Presets/Scripts directory) Select from the menu File: Scripts: SortByHue-Sat-Bri. A dialog window asks how you would like to sort the colors. Enter H for Hue, S for Saturation or B for Brightness.

I hope this helps you out as much as it has for me. Btw: That beautiful color palette I loaded was from the new set of paintings added to ITM from the talented Julie West. For more on it and Julie, click here.

Julie West: Speaking of Cloud

I love Flickr – when they’re not too busy censoring artwork – because without it, I might not have found Julie West’s wonderful artwork. There’s just something about her style of illustration that fits perfectly into In The Mod. To find out a little bit more about her, to see an extended portfolio and shop, you can check out her site here. Be sure to check out her upcoming events – there’s tons of them!

• Speaking of cloud

• Squeeze

• lolly lolly

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You can now add your favorite painting/data visualization from ITM to Digg and/or Delicious by clicking on their respective icons located above the color swatches.

Thanks for the love in advance.

Woohoo!
Drew