Math and Color
There’s a math book on the horizon so lately I’ve been giving a lot of thought to art and math again. I have this tendency to want to represent numerical values with color value, and working in digital art only feeds that thought process. The other day I put together a little piece on median and mean, trying to utilize color like that.
I feel like there is a lot to work with to improve clarity in mathematical concepts. I don’t know if color is the answer for everyone, but I think it’s a strong tool that is generally under utilized. When you think about it, color is like pitch in that it all comes down to wave frequency. And any time you use color in a digital program it all comes down to numerical values of either red, green, and blue, or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. I found a site that lays this out pretty well…
http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisengine/dotnet/8d81aed9-9643-4e22-930c-3cadcb816891.htm
In fact I’ll steal one of their charts right here to further illustrate what I mean
I’ve often thought that I might have been more invested in math early on if I’d had a better understanding of it’s potential. It is not an opposite field from art, it is in fact the groundwork upon which art is based.
Actually, I got into a conversation with the man who helped me buy my house just the other night and learned that he is his own kind of math geek when it comes to finances and investments. I’ve known the man for years without realizing what a data cruncher he is, and sometimes on very intuitive level. I believe that we all do some really advanced math on a very intuitive level, but it’s so often unrecognized. I feel like tapping into color and other art techniques can only help to express mathematical concepts in more intuitive ways and help to bridge that connection for students that might not quite see it yet. And I think that the more students take in about math theory and practice early on, the better they will be when it comes to assessing the everyday things where such calculations come into play, whether it’s in the creation of art, or thinking out investments, or just timing when to cross the street and how quickly in traffic.
It’s food for thought. And I hope to have further solidified my thoughts on all of this by the time we start that text book. I want to work with the power of animation too! I mean, c’mon, we make digital text books! You get to do so many cool things with that!
Ok, enough ramblings for tonight. I haven’t been posting as much lately, and it’s nice to get back to it. Big thanks to all of you regular readers out there.