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  • That famous blue-black-golden-white dress... and painting.

Hello dear Artists, I have another interesting topic for us and for eye training.
Do you remember that Dress ?

Do you think if you see blue-black are you more susceptible to blue colors? Do you prefer blue colors in your paintings over all others?

Do you think if you see golden-white colors there you have better eye trained to distinguish tints and shades of all the colors better than a person from blue-black group? Do you prefer blue colors in your paintings?

I think this is somehow related to how our brain got trained to work. But what is practical side for those differences in terms of color in the paintings?

    I really enjoyed the confusion and interest around that dress. I'm not sure I could draw any qualitative conclusion about my color vision having seen it as blue and black. I think there are a few things at play that are interesting though.

    You're right, there's something psychological going on here. I am pretty sure part of it, in the case of the dress, has to do with it being a photograph. There are certain cues and signal our brains have been trained to expect when view a 2-dimension representation of a 3-dimensional object. That picture apparently sends a number of mixed visual cues that get interpreted differently for different people. I'm not sure this phenomenon would occur when viewing the same dress in real life.

    As an actual optical device, my understanding of our eyes is that the actual light image that passes through the lenses and hits the retinas (upside-down) is rather crude and is "cleaned up in post" by our brains which flips the image right side up, combined the binocular inputs, fixes distortion, etc. Even this amazing feat is a somewhat fragile system illustrated by the long history of optical illusions.

    Which brings me to how we can account for the mild unreliability of what we see, especially in our paintings. I would highly recommend, for those who haven't read it, a copy of Josef Albers book Interaction of Color. As a practicing artist in the Bauhaus School, Albers compiled this very comprehensive work that shows, in detail, how colors behave in relation to each other and how we typically perceive these relationships.

    dracula In my family different people see the dress differently. However most interesting observations that I came within my family, that people who see it white and gold are way better with color choices and values in general in the real life (they do not paint anything other than walls at home time to time) and those choices were better than mine many-many times. I wonder if people here at website were doing similar type of the analysis on the color choices and if the way how they see the dress they think affect their pallet. I know that very often I miss the tone. I was thinking that at some point I'd be able to see that dress white and gold too at least once, but nothing has changed over those years it became popular.

    Thanks for that book name! I'll try to find it. It sounds very intriguing and I certainly want to read it. I guess bigger screen is needed not a phone in this case.

        I see it black and blue, but I remember seeing it in yellow and gold one time back when it first came up - black and blue all the other times though!

        As I'm colorblind (red-green) I'm definitely more prone to blue colors. Purple and teal: just other shades of blue for me. Every shade of pink that isn't straight out of a girl cartoon from the eighties: just grey.

        While this doesn't directly relate to the white and gold it just makes my world a lot more blue that the world of someone who sees normal.

          Felix Thanks Felix. This is very valuable info It is cool to know the person who saw it differently. I was watching videos with Encroma glasses on youtube starting may be few months ago and this is when idea about color influence struck in my mind. I was so happy for the people who saw the color first time in their lives and was very touched by it. I even came up with idea that people with color blindness can see better values thus creating super incredible works of art by playing the color but following value chart.

              dracula I ordered the book. So my husband will be taking the photos from it and sending me to read as I did not find it online.

                  a month later

                  Here I found one more video that talks about color perception...and now because of that experiment at the end I think it is indeed most difficult subject ever. https://youtu.be/MJBfn07gZ30

                    a month later

                    I asked that question about mistakes with color choice from my instructor on my recent course who also is teaching photoshop. He said that this mistake cannot happen when we paint as our brain will have some reference point like our skin color that holds brush and brain will be compensating and comparing everything according to the known object and mistake will not happen.
                    Also one of my recent finding that there are artists who are great with value or there are artist who are good with color and different combinations. I think this really explains all my struggles with drawing and color.

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