Producing a type of colours

[William Overington]

I am wondering how is the best way to produce a type of colour. I am using Affinity Publisher.

Could you please look at the illustration of the Artichoke wallpaper shown in the following Wikipedia page?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallpaper#England

I do not think the colours would be called pastel. Do they have a special name?

I have tried adding white to a colour using RGB values and I have tried transparency.

Those sort of colours seem typical of William Morris style images. Maybe it was the colour of inks at the time. Maybe they have faded.

I would like to try to produce designs in that style with those type of colours. Any advice please?

There are some more illustrations in the following page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Dearle

William

 

[Alfred]

10 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I do not think the colours would be called pastel. Do they have a special name?

I have tried adding white to a colour using RGB values and I have tried transparency.

The colours in the Seaweed wallpaper are not pastel, but I would say that most of the colours in the Artichoke wallpaper are (with the obvious exceptions of the red and the dark green).

How are you “adding white”, William? Simply increasing any of the RGB values will yield a paler colour, but if you want a paler tint of the same base colour it’s probably easier to switch to HSL and move the L slider to the right.

[William Overington]

4 minutes ago, Alfred said:

The colours in the Seaweed wallpaper are not pastel, but I would say that most of the colours in the Artichoke wallpaper are (with the obvious exceptions of the red and the dark green).

How are you “adding white”, William? Simply increasing any of the RGB values will yield a paler colour, but if you want a paler tint of the same base colour it’s probably easier to switch to HSL and move the L slider to the right.

Hello Alfred

It is the red and the green in the Artichoke wallpaper and the colours in the Seaweed wallpaper that are typical of what I am trying to get.

I have been "adding white" in RGB by starting from R=255, G=0, B=0 and then increasing both G and B to have some value x, so as to have R=255, G=x, B=x for some x less than 255.

I have now been trying HSL. Thank you for the advice.

A strange thing is that R=255, G=0, B=0 looks a lot brighter and redder in PagePlusX7 than in Affinity Publisher. Is there some reason for that - maybe that Affinity Publisher is somehow set for print and PagePlus for web or something like that? Or something else?

William

 

 

[William Overington]

2 minutes ago, William Overington said:

A strange thing is that R=255, G=0, B=0 looks a lot brighter and redder in PagePlusX7 than in Affinity Publisher. Is there some reason for that - maybe that Affinity Publisher is somehow set for print and PagePlus for web or something like that? Or something else?

Ah, I had a document set for Print (Press-Ready) by default and when I started again with Web, or Print it is the same as in PagePlus.

I am wanting to produce a PDF for the web so that the colours look like as in the said wallpapers, yet would look "good" (is that the word?) if someone decided to print them out.

William

 

[Wosven]

I'd rather use global colours and tints or use the same colour at a lower opacity before using the colour picker to create a new global colour (I had strange results with HSL).

With global colours, you'll be able later to modify those colours, and it'll modify the whole design. Since tints are those global colours at a lower opacity, they'll be modified too if you used them.

Sadly, we can't add those tints in a colour palette for now, and we need to apply tints to each curve, selecting the percentage or pasting the style.

But I would recommand modifying a global colour from the swatches palette's panel, since there's a bug when doing it on the tint panel (the swatch  isn't at 100% of the new colour but at the tint value).

[gdenby]

I don't have Publisher, but I'm supposing the color picker works the same as that for Designer and Photo. You can sample the wallpaper illustrations, and transfer the color reading from the monitor to the Affinity document. Also, the swatch panel allows creating a palette from and image.

As far as choosing your colors from images found on the web, realize they are at best approximations of what you might see in real life. The "Seaweed" illustration is a .gif file, so the color range most likely has been reduced from the original. 

Also, because printing depends on specific inks, different printers may or may not give a good representation of a CMYK image. Something that one might be expected to be a standard, simple black, can be quite hard to match. I worked w. a group trying to faithfully reproduce contemporary Chinese ink drawings, all monochrome, and it took at least half a dozen test runs to get the blacks right.

[Alfred]

By a strange coincidence, this was posted to Twitter a few minutes ago.