» Aspen Workshop , June 28th, 2006

For the past few years I’ve been spending the last week of June up at the Anderson Ranch Art Complex in Snowmass/Aspen Colorado. The workshop takes on 9 artists - and we spend a week working with my Dynamic Abstraction process to work with programming to dynamically generate digital prints.

Bringing my Canon digital camera up to the ranch is an essential key in my own personal process. Much of the landscape and floral beds around the complex provide me with an opportunity to “rip” color out of nature. This color research / inspiration fuels new color tables that I’ll use throughout the year.

Anderson Ranch, Apsen 2006

Here I take the above original photo and “save for web” which I then can select “GIF 32 No Dither” to have Photoshop begin to “AVERAGE” all of the colors within the image to 32 colors. From the “Color Table” preview I can begin to select and “trash” colors I want to eliminate from the color table.

Anderson Ranch, Apsen 2006

Now you can do a few different things… You can go to flash and from the “color swatches” submenu you can select “add colors” and then simply point to the GIF to extract the colors from the GIF into your Flash file. I’m amazed that so many people don’t know that flash can do this.

Or you can do what I do, which is send our GIF to a PHP script that uses the GD Graphics Library to process the colors out of the color table to an array. Once I get the colors ripped to an array I can have Flash draw objects on the screen and then color those objects randomly from the colors sitting in the array. Kind of like a coloring book, but only with the colored crayons you select.

Here’s a sample of the colors ripped :

Anderson Ranch, Apsen 2006

Anderson Ranch, Apsen 2006

Colors used in Anderson Ranch 2006 workshop :

Anderson Ranch, Apsen 2006

Test Layers :

Anderson Ranch, Apsen 2006

Final Print :

Anderson Ranch, Apsen 2006
Anderson Ranch, Apsen 2006

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20 Responses to “ Aspen Workshop ”
  1. Fish+Bowl - part 2 « Angelina said, on December 12th, 2007 at 12:00 am

    [...] We decided to create 5 color palletes of approximately 17 colors each. We chose 4 beautiful undersea images, and also the banner image on the previous post. Then we began our color extraction process as described by Joshua Davis here. [...]

  2. It’s always something… » Blog Archive » Well it’s not as bad as it appears… said, on November 18th, 2007 at 12:52 am

    [...] in response {I’m sure out of complete fright of my version of reality} I received this link: from a “Joshua” posted to my blog!   It made my day.  So thank you Noah for posting that   It doesn’t [...]

  3. Joshua Davis said, on October 15th, 2007 at 11:27 am

    Hey Sarah - you can find information here : http://workshop.joshuadavis.com

  4. Sarah said, on October 10th, 2007 at 4:09 pm

    Hiya my name is Sarah and im at my last year at my school and I am studying in art your work. I need to write all about you and use your images and make my own. I need some help with the information about you also can you give me some advice on how to use your images and make my own.

    thank you
    From Sarah

  5. Andrew said, on June 15th, 2007 at 2:01 am

    Hey there Joshua!!!

    Saw you speak at spark 05 and have been a long time fan of your design. I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction in regards to one of your scripts.

    Q: Is there a way to have multiple movies independently moving around the stage?

    _root.movie_mc.onEnterFrame = function() {
    if (_root.running && Math.abs(_root.marker_mc._x-this._x)

  6. Jesse Thomas said, on May 15th, 2007 at 9:19 am

    I am really excited about the class! see you there

  7. hubert cumberdale said, on March 11th, 2007 at 9:36 am

    Thanks for keeping your promise. This is a clever approach for isolating colors and building palettes, saving me time and frustration.

  8. Joshua Davis said, on February 15th, 2007 at 1:19 pm

    yes eric I had just finished the BMW project when I taught this workshop and I had tons of assets I had used in the making of the BMW print - and when I taught this workshop I used the BMW project as a reference when we started making prints.

    the pink colors - we’re from photos I didn’t get off of my camera until after the workshop was over. and I’m actualy using the pinks in my new Moto RIZR wired mag AD which I’ll post the process of that soon.

    it’s all process… flow - things flow into others - there’s no start and end - only mutation.

  9. eric said, on February 15th, 2007 at 12:25 pm

    im bored here at college so i figured i would post. I see alot of simularities in this work as well as with your work with the bmw z4. Same illustrations and letters. I am also corious why you didnt use the colors you got from the flower to use in the final prints?
    Im diggin’ the process alot.

    eric

  10. Christian Halbach said, on February 10th, 2007 at 7:46 pm

    Hey Joshua, although I hadn’t ckecked out your most recent projects, I have been following your work since 1999. You have given me a lot of inspiration. Thank’s for sharing!

  11. Joshua Davis said, on January 23rd, 2007 at 12:36 pm

    hey Eric - would love to have you come to the workshop… it’s best if you brush up on nothing… it’s much easier to start you at day 1 from scratch, since the process is very specific.

  12. eric said, on January 23rd, 2007 at 12:31 pm

    i am trying to get into the 2007 aspen ranch class in June, any suggestions on what to brush up on or pre-pare for before june? love your work for the krazer, i got to get one now.

    –eric

  13. precision techconet said, on January 18th, 2007 at 2:02 am

    Very good colour selection….

  14. Joshua Davis said, on January 2nd, 2007 at 7:02 pm

    with a bit more tinkering RON - I don’t see why not. I don’t have anything right now - but I might search around on the net to see if anybody has an HEX to CMYK convert.

  15. Ron Domingue said, on January 2nd, 2007 at 3:11 pm

    Now can you bring that swatch back into Illustrator? I like to be able to convert them to CMYK values if I need to.

    Thanks again Joshua!

    // Ron

  16. Joshua Davis said, on January 1st, 2007 at 1:05 pm

    thanks Sean!

    –

    right here Martin : http://colorstripping.joshuadavis.com

  17. Martin said, on January 1st, 2007 at 12:50 pm

    hi Joshua!, where I can find a system to rip colors from any image similar that you have ??

    best

  18. sean white said, on December 31st, 2006 at 9:53 pm

    yo man you’re sick, flowers then to some sick shit love it.

  19. Joshua Davis said, on December 29th, 2006 at 8:16 pm

    thanks for the link… this actually works quite nice.

    it does require to import - rip and then clean up the .GIF out of your stage/library if you’re a neat-freak like me… but still a nice little extension for sure.

  20. marcel said, on December 29th, 2006 at 5:54 pm

    you should read this article, its about a “…JSFL based Flash panel that will get the index colors of a gif that is selected on the stage and then write an array of the hex colors to the current timeline in a new layer…”

    http://www.ilikegravity.com/real/archives/2005/11/i_suck_at_color.php