I've heard about the golden mean and fair curves and I can turn a bowl with a reasonable approach to them. I can proceed thru twenty six grits of sand- paper, then buff from tripoli to carnauba by way of white diamond. I've got wax and oil, lacquer and varnish, detergent and shoe polish. I can draw overlapping leaves on my turnings and dremel them to a fare-the-well. Then why are Andi's bowls basking in the Del Mano while it's iffy if mine will grace the booth between the 4-H pigs and the Future Farmer's goats at the Martin County Fair? It appears that the only thing holding me back from greatness must be color, so I surfed the net to learn all about Andi's colors of Fall, as well as the rest of the year. I'm still barred from the Del Mano, but like any lout with a tiny bit of shallow knowledge, I am compelled to force it on a long suffering rcw. So if all artists, photographers, physicists and anyone else who knows anything at all about color will please leave, I'll try to write a little primer & expose' for the rest of us. Like it or not, colored turnings are here, so we better get with the program.
*********************************************** Color has to do with the wavelength and frequency of light. The colors of a bowl will be perceived according to which wave lengths the bowl absorbs; ie. you don't see the colors of the absorbed waves.The visible wavelengths (colors) make up a spectrum ranging from red to violet (Roy G. Biv) and can be thought of as a clock face with red at 12, yellow at 4, and blue at 8. These are the pure or primary colors, and all the rest are mixtures of them. The so-called secondary colors are mixes of primaries. They are orange (red & yellow) at 2, green (yellow & blue) at 6, and violet (blue & red) at 10. The tertiary colors are mixes of a primary and a secondary color and are named for the mix: red-orange at 1, yellow-orange at 3, yellow-green at 5, green-blue at 7, blue violet at 9 and red-violet at 11. Then there's white, made up of all colors and black with none. That's all you need to know about colors, so you should soon be in the Del Mano. But wait! there's more. If you order today, you also get shades (a color + black), tints (a color + white) and intensity (dull or bright). A bright color contains relatively little gray, while dull colors contain relatively more gray, compared to its pure component. We will also include hues and tones if you order now. A hue is the resultant color that you see, whether pure or a mix. Only women know the names for tones; names such as watermelon, lemonade, etc. Tone depends upon what is mixed with a pure color. A pure color (R,Y,G) has no tone. Everything else has some tone depending on what's mixed up with the pure. (Sociologists and Anthropologists should have left also.) Anyway, this important knowledge about color that I am braying 'ex cathedra' should certainly make you a great wood artist. _Except that I forgot to mention that the colors those miserable critics appreciate vary with the spaces and colors surrounding our masterpieces. Also different kinds of sunlight, light bulbs and retinas of the beholders change viewer's perceptions . We can't win, so let's hear it for pure unadulterated wood grain and pretend not to care about color. That is, if anybody's still awake.;) ArchFortiter,