Experiencing Joy Through Art

   Hello! It’s great to have you back. I wanted to share with you this amazing piece of artwork that was brought to my attention recently. As a person who also works in the graphic design industry as well as fine art, I love it when I find something that crosses over and combines the two camps together.

   If you haven’t heard of Pantone before, let me explain what it is. Pantone is a standard color matching system that is used in the graphics and printing industry. Pantone colors are sometimes referred to as “spot color”. They are generally used when a designer or printer wants to use a color that cannot be reproduced by the standard CMYK printing method. 

   CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (K). Most of the color photographs you see printed in books and magazines are composed of tiny little dots of these four colors in differing amounts. The eye optically mixes them together (the dots are quite small) to create almost any color you want. It’s the same idea that Seurat used in his pointilism paintings. This is known as four-color offset printing. The dots of color have to be “offset” from each other in order for the eye to blend them into different colors.

   However there are some colors that CMYK cannot create…usually very bright or saturated colors. This is where Pantone spot colors come in. Pantone inks are more like the paints you buy in the art supply store. They are single color inks that can be used when a special color is needed. There are thousands of Pantone colors to choose from. 

   If you have ever noticed on the bottom of your cereal box flap, sometimes there are a series of colored squares. These are the test spots for both the CMYK colors which will appear followed by any spot colors used on the box. Pantone colors are also often also used by companies that have a proprietary color in their logo that needs to be exactly the same whenever it’s used.

   Graphic designers and ad agencies have huge Pantone swatch books they can look through to choose colors. All of the different Pantone colors are numbered for easy matching. They are standardized so they will always be the same no matter where they are printed.

   A Brazilian artist named Angélica Dass used it a new and unique way…She took photographs of a multitude of different people from many races and then found their matching skin tone in the Pantone swatch book. She presents each person standing in front of his or her own Pantone color that matches their skin.

   Not only is this an impressive undertaking, but it is a moving and profound art piece that celebrates both the beauty in the range of human skin tones and our sameness as well as our differences. I invite you to experience this amazing body of work…

http://humanae.tumblr.com