I have decided to put these two post together as I really only got everything I was working on to work as I was finishing up the project.
This project ended up taking much more research and problem solving than I was hoping or expecting to put into this. Coming into this project I assumed that I had a good understanding illusions and color theory before starting this project so I felt that the hardest part would be doing the drawing that would become part of the illusion. Another problem that I had was implementing the illusion into the art and how to implement the illusion in adobe illustrator. A big help was this website made by Dan Wilson. Here he does a good job explaining the “red reveal” trick and how it works. It works by having lots of lines or random letters or somethings distracting in a certain red color that is the same color as the filter. under this you have the secret image you want to show in the color that is opposite that of the filter color when looking at a color wheel. In the case of a red filter that opposite color is cyan. He also explains how to implement it through code that he has written. This helped a lot but still left me to implement it into illustrator. I also wanted to do this illusion not only with a red filter but a blue one as well.
For the art I wanted to make I wanted it to be something that had two parts that could come together to become one piece of art. This idea reminded me of a sketch I did a while back that both resembled a tree as well as a hand that was the roots. This was done in a as a very rudimentary sketch. I wanted to make re-creatable in illustrator. Unfortunately I do not have a drawing tablet so to draw the picture well and the existing drawing would not have scanned well so I drew an entirely new picture. I scanned that photo then drew lines over it in illustrator. This gave it an interesting look but I felt that it didn’t translate amazingly in illustrator and the way the illusion works it would not have been easy to do any form of shading to give the picture more depth. I did the tree “freehand” in illustrator and again lacked the amount of detail that I wanted but due to lack of time, what I decided to go with.
The hardest part of this project was to have the colors in images matching actually disappear and reappear in the gel filter was placed on top. This is where I ended up wasting a lot of time to understand the concept. Since I bought the filters off of amazon and not some nice theater company I did not have the color values of the color screen. To try and combat this I printed out several color swaths to try and see which would blend in the most with the gel over it. This works quite well with red but was much harder to replicate with other colors like blue as there is much less information on it online and despite doing lots of guessing it never looked as good as the red filter did.
For the physical piece I printed out the image I had created and fastened it to a piece of cardboard. I then cut out red and blue gel filter pieces that could go over the top and bottom sections of the picture. I then clear tape as a sort of hinge for the filter so that it could be easily placed over and taken off the picture.
Citations:
https://danielcwilson.com/blog/2018/02/optical-fun-red-reveal/
https://www.controlbooth.com/threads/looking-for-approx-rgb-equivalents-for-gel-colors.27351/
https://convertingcolors.com/hsl-color-230_100_50.html?search=HSL%20%20230,%20100%,%2050%
I really like how you had a unique take on the light art project to play with light and colors to create illusions, and I think end result turned out great.
I really like your drawings and I think the illustrator designs look pretty cool! The concept seems complex, but I’m glad you were able to get a good understanding of it in the end!
This project is really interesting and I’m glad you found a way to incorporate the light to make an optical illusion. Very cool!