Like all of you, I love doing a little web surfing for inspiration and to enjoy the eye candy. Now that there are a lot of needlepoint blogs to read, the opportunities for ideas to enhance our stitching are even larger than before blogging was popular. One of my very favorite blogs is Laura Perin's Two Handed Stitcher, where she just finished stitching a gerber daisy based on a photograph her sister took. (To see it, look for the May 26 entry in the first link below.) Laura has been bragging about her sister's photographs for a while, so I finally visited her sister's blog and enjoyed the photos a lot. Here's Laura's blog.
http://two-handedstitcher.blogspot.com/
Here is her sister's.
http://www.goingtopieces.blogspot.com/
But the new fun thing I found on Laura's sister's blog is mention of this website--Big Huge Labs--which apparently has a ton of free Photoshop and photo tools. I love this one!
http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/colors.php
You upload a digital photo and it analyzes the colors and gives you "swatches" that relate to Photoshop somehow. (Maybe a color correction tool? I don't know much about Photoshop.) You also get the HTML code for the colors. I'm using that code to match the ivory color of my Blog lady photo so I can make the background of my Blogspot blog the same ivory. HTML is the main computer code that makes blogs work. I'm told it's a bit outdated as programming languages go, but it is widely known and versatile so blog programming is usually based on it. I use HTML to make words bold, start a new paragraph, center a photo on the page or to the side, and to tell Blogspot what color I want my background on Blog to be.
I thought you'd have fun looking at the photo tools. The color analysis tool has flaws--I think there might be a limit to the number of colors it displays (I uploaded a photo of Virginia bluebells in bloom and got tons of shades of green for the leaves, almost as many browns for the ground and no blues at all for the bluebells!) and of course the photo quality really determines what the color analysis tool can do, but it was a fun browse. Later on I'll use the tool to pull out colors from designs when I am trying to choose threads. Sometimes I don't notice a color when I'm getting ready to stitch. Some painted canvas designers put little boxes of all the paint colors they used in the margin of the canvas but not all do this.
If you want to see the color tool in action, browse these two blogs. Color-Stripes is a graphic designer's blog but she uses the tool constantly to analyze photographs she likes. The second link is to Orna Willis' website. You probably have seen her geometrics on her website, so take a tour of her thoughts and see the color schemes she explores with this tool.
http://color-stripes.blogspot.com/
http://www.ornadesign.blogspot.com/
Hope you have fun with color through visiting the above.
Jane/Chilly Hollow
blogging at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow and
mirror blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
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