It's back to the studio for me, as I take a short break before proceeding to trigonometric equations. I am also looking forward to re-introducing myself to logarithms, which I briefly encountered in high school but have long since forgotten. But first before actually making any art, I need to update my color charts for markers.

I am a "marker junkie." I can go on and on about markers. I've used this medium for years, especially on commercial jobs. Most markers are made with non-permanent colors and will fade rather quickly, but for commercial work this is not an issue, since (as I explained in my last entry here) commercial signs are temporary. Also, with the availability of good computer scanning, even illustrations with fade-able (the official term for it is "fugitive") markers can be made into more or less permanent digital images. One of the good things about doing commercial work with markers is that you can get the client (your employer) to subsidize your marker habit. I now have hundreds of them.

The variety and technology of markers have improved greatly in the last twenty years. Most of them no longer use the toxic solvents they used to, which made marker work in a closed place into inhalant abuse. New generations of water-based markers have also been created which provide not only the garish colors of the older type of marker but a wide palette of neutralized colors, pastels, and many shades of cool, warm, and neutral grey. With enough of a collection, you can create something in markers which looks almost as good as a watercolor painting. The only thing you can't do is a wide area of blending (a "wash") which still requires blending paint rather than markers.

The art-minded among you can see a great selection of these at the Jerry's Artarama Marker Center. I've used almost every single one of them. I buy compartmentalized plastic boxes at The Container Store, one of the best stores in the world, and I put the markers in there sorted by color and shade and lightness. Then I make color charts which show what colors each marker writes, again sorted by color and shade and lightness, with identifying notes as to which marker it is. This is a painstaking process but it makes using the markers so much easier. When you need a specific color, you just look at the chart, and grab the marker from its compartment in the box. And since the color on the outside of the marker often doesn't match the real color of the marker, your annotated chart will show you the true color.

At this point you may be thinking that I am excessively organized and probably edging into obsessive-compulsive, and you may be right. However, I think that anyone who loves order and color, or who has any artistic impulses at all, will respond positively to a color chart. It brings back the crayons of one's youth, or the colorful toys left behind in childhood. A color chart tempts you with visions of artistic play; it has the sweet potential of an ice-cream menu.

The analogue of these color charts in mathematics may well be trigonometric tables or logarithmic tables. I am not referring to the synesthesia which makes numbers into mosaics of colors (which I have fortunately been able to put aside) but the idea of an ordered array of gradations and their associations. The "Trigonometric Functions of Some Particular Angles" table in the back of one of my math books is filled with allusions to those venerable Pythagorean triangles and their famous angles, 30, 60, 90 degrees, or 45, 45, 90 degrees. The wheel spins, and the table gives us the sine, cosine, and tangent, etc. of the other quadrants' angles too. To a mathematician, each one of these angles has its flavor and its associations. And unlike markers, these angles and functions never run dry and their art never fades.

Posted at 2:39 am | link