I like plaids and stripes because the patterns are based on the same technology that is used to make the fabric, namely weaving. Just set up your loom with colored yarn in the right sequence, and you get a pattern. Printed patterns, on the other hand, require an unholy marriage of printing technology with weaving technology. It's just not right. Computer screens, with their rectangular grids of pixels, are well-suited for simulated weaving. It may be hard to see, but this plaid is constructed as if horizontal and vertical threads, each thread a single color, are woven in an over-and-under pattern, with each pixel taking the color of the thread that is on top at that point.
Traditional plaids tend to be drab because the traditions where formed before the invention of synthetic dyes (mauveine in 1856). The patterns are simple because only simple patterns were possible before the Jacquard loom in 1801. The Jacquard loom was the first programmable machine and a precursor of the computer.
So here I am using computers inspired by looms to generate a traditional woven pattern! I can use any colors I want, and I can generate hundreds of variations before choosing one I like. The only thing missing is physical cloth.
3 comments:
It looks like when more than one color is crossing a pixel point, that the colors get deeper. Or is that an optical illusion?
CET
I think what you are calling a pixel point is actually a 4 by 4 grid of pixels. Where all the pixels are the same color, the color seems deeper. If half are colored pixels and half are white, the effect is more of a pastel.
You might have to put a magnifying up to the screen to see the individual pixels.
Oops, did I say "colored pixels"? How incorrect of me. I meant "pixels of color".
So it is an optical illusion, but that seems to indicate or imply that everything we see is also an optical illusion. If I had alien or mutated receptors or a different screening method in my nerves I would see things differently. I say this out of personal experience. When I was very young I had a serious systemic infection that caused things to appear randomly closer or further away and I thought that everyone experienced a more fluid physical world. I read much later that the human body creates an LSD type chemical during those types of illnesses. The pixels may be the physical reality of vision, but the pixel pixies of the palette create magic in the eyes of the observer?
The Boomer Biddy
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