Awesome Color

An ordinary spray paint can only produce a single color. Ukrainian street artist Vitaly Tesh invented a spray can that can output numerous colors. After an earlier effort to build the system, his updated Graffiti Color Mixer 2.0 produces smooth transitions between four source colors. His custom-built remote control lets him switch colors on the fly.

We’ve featured the hypnotic fluid creations of artist Roman De Giuli before. In this video, he demonstrates the Emitter – a custom-engineered machine that uses stepper motors to pump and drip colorful pigments into water. The resulting designs are still organic but exhibit a rhythm and repetition not seen in De Giuli’s earlier works. Shot in 8K HDR at 60 fps.

How colors work can be quite fascinating – especially when it comes to light and shadow. Instagrammer art.pete.repeat offers a simple yet effective demonstration of how additive colors behave by aiming red, green, and blue flashlights at card stock. Pete posted another video explaining the setup. (Thanks, Rob!)

FIAT has stopped making grey cars. Why? Because they’re everywhere and that’s boring. As FIAT CEO Oliver Francois says, “Grey is not dolce vita,” alluding to the Italian way of living “the sweet life.” To prove he’s serious, Francois got into a 600e and had it dunked into an enormous can of orange paint.

Artist Kendra Norton’s unique coloring book has no outlines for you to color in. Instead, it’s filled with abstract blobs of color, and you draw the lines. Whether you doodle dinosaurs, flowers, buildings, or goldfish, go where your imagination takes you. In addition to the original, there are also Through the Seasons and Mindful Journeys editions.

Give your Mac a visual upgrade with Softorino’s Folder Colorizer. The app lets you combine images, icons, and colors on your Mac’s folders to help identify their contents. It can even suggest relevant images on your system based on the folder’s name. It’s also available as part of Softorino’s 15-app Universal License.

Typical 3D printers can output one or two colors at a time, but this 3D printer from Mimaki can print objects from a palette of more than 10 million colors. 3D Printing Nerd got look at its capabilities during Formnext USA. It creates objects by printing layers of UV-curable CMYK resins encased in a water-soluble support material.

This upcoming action RPG drops players into an artful world that has lost its color. Your objective: saturate the place with color while battling an array of challenging enemies and bosses with weapons and magic. Download the Windows demo on Steam, and sign up to be notified when their Kickstarter launches.

On April 18, 1906, San Francisco was devastated by a horrific 7.9 magnitude earthquake. This fascinating footage of Market Street gives us a glimpse of what it looked like just four days before the quake hit and leveled much of the city. NASS used AI tech to enhance and colorize the film, and added ambient sound effects.

Argentina artist Felipe Pantone is known for eye-catching artworks that play with shades of color. His Subtractive Variability series is especially fascinating with its layered gradient color discs that reveal different color schemes as they’re rotated. He’s made other variants which are similarly awesome to watch.

Three centuries before Pantone colors, artist A. Boogert meticulously cataloged hundreds of paint pigments. The Galobart Books is offering a limited run of this fascinating piece of design history. Each book comes in a slipcase with a numbered certificate, 10 frameable prints, and a study guide. View the original book here.

Gav from The Slow Mo Guys dusted off some of the mousetraps they used in their man vs. mousetraps video, set them up, and poured powdered paint pigments onto each one. After an extensive amount of prep, he triggered the traps, ran away, and recorded the spectacle of flying colors for us all to enjoy in magnificent slow-motion.

Captain Disillusion is back with another one of his great educational videos about imaging technology and terminology. This time, he explains how our brains and eyes perceive color, and how computers can be used to manipulate hue, saturation, and brightness to our every whim.

A wonderful piece of wall art for any music fan, Dorothy’s open edition litho print features the titles of nearly 600 colorful songs, each arranged by the hue in its title. The 2020 edition includes 20 new tracks, and you can listen to all of the songs on this Spotify playlist. Measures 100cm H x 70cm W (~39.3″ x 27.6″).

Scientists from MIT CSAIL have developed an incredible technology which allows for personalization of objects by using special photochromic dyes. By exposing the pigments to ultraviolet light, designs be “reprogrammed” by removing portions of their cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes to expose new patterns. More here.

Mashable introduces us to Tomislav Topic and Thomas Granseuer of Quintessenz. The duo creates colorful and dynamic art installations by spray-painting flexible mesh material, then layering them into gradations of color. When set against real-world backdrops, they look almost like digital imagery.

Similar to their colorful wide markers, Chameleon Fineliner pens use a specially designed ink delivery system and a mixing tip, allowing artists to smoothly blend colors, while still maintaining a beautifully thin 0.3mm line width.

Tom Scott recently paid a visit a truly unusual and extraordinary collection – a working research library dedicated to the history of color. The Forbes Pigment Collection has spent decades cataloging and storing rare pigments to help verify the authenticity of works of art.

While you might think your jeans are dyed indigo, they’re not. The real deal is hard to come by, and much richer than what we’re used to. The fascinating thing isn’t the color, but the natural properties it offers that drove Samurai to wear indigo fabric beneath their armor.

The unique YouTube channel Film Color Palettes compiles scenes from visually compelling movies, and then proceeds to break down the images into collections of color swatches. It’s a neat resource for designers and artists, though it could use more videos. (Thanks Lane!)