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Software Page |
Tutorials Page |
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INTRODUCTION
When painting with traditional media, I probably spend about 25% - 33% of my time mixing colours on the palette. One of the advantages of digital painting is a reduction in this mixing time. No brushes to clean or dry, no tube squeezing or bottle pouring, and best of all,; No washing up!
All of which means that I don't begrudge any time spent in mixing colours on the computer. Even better, I can store the results as Swatches that don't dry out.Satori's Colour Palette (Sorry, Color Palette)
One of the big surprises, or should I say small surprises, in Satori is the Color Palette. It's not very generous in size, and mixing colours to store in Swatches can take several preliminary mixes.
Some of my painting projects require three or four custom Swatches to set out my palette. I generally set out a triad of colours as the bones of my colour compositions, Roughly speaking, this means choosing a yellow, a red and a blue, and various complementary mixes, accents and highlights.
Usually my workflow only involves the Colour Cubes, the Mix tab and the Swatch tab.Those two Colour Cubes are so small! Even with my stylus set to a 4 pixel click range, small movements of the cursor results in big jumps of colour.
Tiny, aren't they?
(Shown actual size)
The Mix area is also pretty small.
Only 100 pixels wide
Only 2 Colours + black and white
The Mix area also has two permanent fixtures, whatever colours you enter in the colour pots. White occupies the top right, while Black lives in the bottom left, whether you want them there or not. The picture on the right, above, clearly shows the narrow diagonal mixing band between the two chosen colours.
To overcome some of these limitations, I got into the practice of using the Geometry tools to create mini canvases that blended three or four colours, using a Box Corner filled Rectangle. I then subdivided the canvas using a grid equivalent to the Swatch (8 X 6 ells), and sampled the mixed colours into a Swatch, and then saved it.
Here's what it looks like...
Pick the colours from the canvas...
and drop them in the Swatch.
There are a couple of drawbacks with this method. First. it's tedious to do. Second, it requires careful naming and filing in the Swatches folder. I keep these Swatches in folders named by project and archive them along with the finished job.
There is also less control over the value of the colours ( How light or dark they are ).So, instead of gaining time, I was starting to lose time. What I needed was an all purpose, interactive colour blender/mixer with subtle control over the values of chosen colours, preferably using sliders.
Amazingly, Satori provides exactly the tool required. It's called a canvas file.
But How????
Go to page 2 to see the solution!
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