Greeting Cards – Sven Bonnichsen

Reinventing the Color Wheel

On October 23, 2023

For the past month, I’ve been obsessing over color theory.

1. 24-Swatch CMY “Rainbow Bead Bracelet”

Old paradigm: When I use traditional paints to make greeting card art, the original image gets scanned. Then, I try to correct colors in PhotoShop, do layout in Illustrator, and print onto cardstock using a color laser printer. The colors never match exactly. It’s best to think of the cards as interpretations or derivative works.

New paradigm: Think of the laser printer as a painting robot, with built-in brushes and tubes of paint. Instead of trying to get accurate reproductions, approach the printer itself as my primary art-making tool.

Most folks learned in school how Red+Yellow=Orange, Yellow+Blue=Green, and Blue+Red=Purple. But the laser printer uses a completely different color system. The ways that Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black interact with each other are much less intuitive.

Expert artists who use oil paints or watercolors often make their own color charts. After all, paints are chemistry: Cadmium, Cobalt, Phthalo, Zinc! Instead of expecting a platonic rainbow, we need to see what specific colors are available in reality.

The same principle applies for toner cartridges. Who’s to say that Hewlett-Packard and Xerox use the same formulas for Cyan? So last fall I created my first “digital paintbox.” The main idea is that when I want to select a color, I should first look at the physical reference chart, rather than trusting what I might see on a computer screen.

3. Revised 227-Swatch CMYK Chart
(click for PDF)

A small, lingering dissatisfaction with the original chart has has stuck with me. The past month’s color odyssey began with a decision to revise its labels.

The column of numbers on the left describes color-mixing in terms of proportions. The numbers 2:4:0 should be translated as 50% Cyan + 100% Magenta + 0% Yellow — which combine to make a nice purple. To help clarify these relationships, I added vertical bars of monochromatic color beneath the three-digit codes.

This step prompted me to similarly clarify labels at the top of the chart. A “shade” adds some amount of black to the color mix. A “tint,” on the other hand, decreases the amount of toner used, thus allowing more paper to show through. For example, a 40% tint of our 2:4:0 purple translates as 20% Cyan + 40% Magenta + 0% Yellow — a pleasant lavender. I feel these concepts become much more intuitive when the labels “SHADES” and “TINTS” are printed directly over representative shades of Black (left) and tints of CMY (right).

Something important was still missing from my revised chart: browns.

The 227-Swatch CMYK Chart is fundamentally based on a circular color sequence, illustrated by the “Rainbow Bead Bracelet” up top. If you look carefully, you’ll realize that none of the swatches combine Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow all at the same time. The three “primaries” only appear in their pure form (e.g. 0:4:0), or mixed with one adjacent color (e.g. 1:4:0 or 0:4:1).

My improved labeling system helped me finally see how to explore browns. Both the “Bracelet” and the middle column of the “digital paintbox” show 24 color swatches that have 0% Black and a maximum density of toner (100% tint). If you look at their CMY ratios (numbers on the left), notice that there’s always at least one zero in the three-digit code. In a new file, I made four copies of these 24 swatches, then systematically replaced zeros with 1s, 2s, 3s, and 4s. Assuming we confine toner increments of 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%, my results now demonstrate all possible CMY combinations.

When I set out to explore browns, I recalled from RGB color theory that you usually start with Red+Yellow, then add a bit of Blue to muddy things up. The new “3-Color CMY Mix Chart” achieves this — but also reveals a lot more than just brown. I see some delicious wine reds, pine greens, and murky oceanic blues in there, too.

5. Combining Tints + Shades to Make Browns & Grays

In RGB, another way to create brown is to start with Red+Yellow, then add a bit of Black. This got me to thinking. Some of the Black-shaded reds, oranges, and yellows in my original “paintbox” could probably serve as browns. But what if I started with just the four CMY “tint” columns and then sequentially added 20%, 40%, and 80%-Black to each of them?

This experiment resulted in the chart immediately above. What I notice is that adding Black creates colors which are more dingy. Before, when I was only mixing C+M+Y, colors were richer.

Also, I was surprised by how many of these swatches basically look gray to me. I guess I tend to think of “grays” as an entirely desaturated color set… But really, there’s a huge world of gently-tinted grays that you could choose to work with.

While building the “Tint+Shade Chart,” I kept glancing over at the freshly completed “3-Color CMY Mix Chart.” Slowly it dawned on me: my clever document was chock-full of duplicate values.

Embarrassing.

I spent a while going over the chart again, deleting all the repeated swatches. What emerged is a collection of dots clustered into three triangular groups. I had a hunch…

I wondered if a hexagonal logic might be at work?

7. Remaining Swatches Arranged Hexagonally

I tried reorganizing the dots again. Sure enough, they fit neatly inside a series of concentric hexagons. And all the relationships implied by mixing adjacent colors have been appropriately preserved.

Could I perhaps get rid of the dots entirely? Transition instead to a grid comprised wholly of hexagons?

YES. This iteration started off mainly as an aesthetic curiosity. But as I continued exploring CYMK color theory, from here on forward, the “honeycomb” image became ever more useful.

Outside the Picture Frame

By sven

On December 21, 2022

In Greeting Cards

All of my greeting card images fill the 5×7″ picture frame entirely. It’s as if you’re inside a house, looking out through a window. You intuitively know there’s more to the landscape than just the small part that’s visible from where you’re standing.

In order to achieve this effect, I deliberately construct more imagery than I need. Create a big canvas, frame a smaller section. Below, have a look at what lies outside the picture frame for this year’s cards.

(Click on images to see extra-large versions!)

1. Public Access Xanadu: 1980 Timeslip Broadcast

2. Underneath Xanadu (“Tanglestar” Prototype)

7. And All Around Me, My Garden of Stars

Building more imagery than I need leads to a very interesting possibility. I have the option to reframe my artwork. The frame doesn’t have to be 5×7. Instead, for instance, I could select an area with a 16:9 aspect ratio. That’s the frame shape we currently associate with television and cinema.

For years, I’ve wondered what my greeting cards would look like if they were translated into animation. By reframing this year’s designs to 16:9, I now have concept art that shows me much more clearly what animated versions might look like.

The fact that I made this year’s cards using vector art is also important. Regardless of what frame I use, animation made using acrylic paints would be extremely labor-intensive. But having begun in Adobe Illustrator, I can now import the shapes that I’ve constructed directly into Adobe After Effects.

The leap from concept art to animation suddenly looks very small indeed.

Tanglestar Rotation Sampler

By sven

On December 20, 2022

In Animated GIFs, Greeting Cards

A visual theme emerged organically while creating greeting cards for 2023. All the designs feature overlapping spirals of five-pointed stars, which I’ve dubbed “tanglestars.”

1. Rotation Arrays Ranging From 1 to 16 Degrees

Once I realized that I’d be producing a series of tanglestars, I decided to create a sampler set showcasing different rotations. I could tell that interesting ripples would emerge as the stars twirl and overlap — but needed to understand the possible results in practice, not just theory.

Key measurements: The outline of the card is 5″ wide by 7″ tall. The stars share a center point, located 4″ up from the bottom of the card. Each star is comprised of both an interior and exterior outline. Each exterior outline is bounded by a circle. There are 20 circles (and stars), with outer radiuses that range from .5″ to 10″ in half-inch increments. The distance from a star’s center to its tips is exactly twice the distance from the center to its elbows. Vertices of a star’s interior outline are all placed .25″ inward from the matching exterior vertices. Neither interior nor exterior elbow vertices coincide with circles.

My initial series of rotation tests were saved as bare-bones Adobe Illustrator files. Reviewing them for this blog post, I was struck again by a desire to see these tanglestar samples animated. So I’ve revisited the images and made changes. I’ve added a gray background for contrast, and compiled them into an animated GIF.

3. Tanglestar Rotation Sampler in Motion

The GIF was created using an old but powerful command-line app called ImageMagick. I further compressed it using the FreeConvert website. Unlike film or TV, animated GIFs measure frame rates in centiseconds. I’ve set the time delay between frames in this GIF to 15 centiseconds.

There’s still a chance that I may wind up doing more with the tanglestar concept, so I’m embedding a gallery of my sampler images below, for future reference.

Why did I stop at 16 degrees? Due to the way I constructed these shapes, I had to adjust the rotation for every individual star one at a time. With the zero-degree version as my default, and the centermost star remaining fixed, that’s 304 stars that needed to be turned. Patient, methodical work suits me — but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere!

4. Tanglestar Rotation Animation (Card Crop)

Digital Paintbox

By sven

On December 19, 2022

In Greeting Cards, Paintings

In 2007, I built myself some nice paint storage boxes. They hold a rainbow of cheap crafter’s paints. These are 2-ounce bottles of acrylic, Delta Ceramcoat brand. They cost about $1.60 each at JOANN Fabric and Craft Stores. I also keep a selection of fancy Golden brand acrylics on hand. But crafter’s paints remain my go-to choice. It’s just super convenient being able to pull out whatever color you want without having to blend.

When I’m making birthday cards, one of the most irksome steps is doing color correction on the digital files. I try to get our laser printer to match the original painting as best I can. But I’ve learned it’s best to think of the prints as independent pieces of art. They’re derivative of the original, but allowed to be different — so long as I like them for their own merits.

Switching to vector art this year was a game-changer. Working in Adobe Illustrator, I could use CMYK colors right from the start. By printing out a reference chart of swatches, I could select which colors I wanted to use with real certainty about how they’d appear on paper.

Like with my array of acrylics, I craved a digital paintbox to put the rainbow at my fingertips.

Unfortunately, I find Illustrator’s built-in CMYK swatches really difficult to use. The sheer number of swatches is overwhelming. My eye can’t easily tell the difference between similar groupings. And they’re not arranged in an order that I find intuitive.

So, I decided to create my own paintbox.

3. Free Printable CMYK Chart from swatchos.com

Researching online, I stumbled upon this really useful Free CYMK Chart, which is available as a printable PDF download. What I like most is how it provides the numerical codes for each color. This, more than anything else, helped me understand how each color swatch is built from different percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

I built my personalized set of color swatches in Adobe Illustrator. I wanted the swatches to be round, like the bottoms of the bottles in my physical paint set. I put the colors in rainbow order: ROYGBV, with red at the top, and magenta as an afterthought to violet. I typed in all the color codes by hand, replicating numbers from the Swatchos chart.

The center column represents color mixes at 100% saturation, without any black. Swatches to the right (“tints”) have lower color saturation, allowing more paper to show through. Swatches to the left (“shades”) are darkened by the addition of black toner.

Ratios marked on the far left represent the mix of cyan, magenta, and yellow. For example, spring green is four parts yellow to one part cyan (4:1). Royal purple is three parts cyan to four parts magenta (3:4). I think I could make the chart clearer in a future draft… I imagine adding vertical color bars next to the ratios, to show where C, M, & Y each begin, end, and overlap.

Rows with pure cyan, magenta, or yellow are labeled with colored squares. Human vision is a bit subjective — so I also added colored circles to mark the rows where I personally see true red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.

While doing color correction in the past, I’ve noticed a few quirks about our printer. This exercise helped me crystalize those observations. Yellow is the weakest toner, and is easily overwhelmed by the addition of other colors. Red, on the other hand, dominates and seems to be overrepresented. And, it’s hard to get either a good turquoise or orange from CMYK.

Wanting finer gradations — particularly on either side of true yellow — I set about making an expanded paintbox… So many more color codes to type in!

In the process, I discovered a curious optical illusion. I don’t know about you, but if I stare at that grid of colored dots, it only takes seconds for them all to turn black — with just a few shades of gray on the right. Probably the chemicals in my eyes’ rods and cones get spent? I don’t know.

Anyway, now I keep print-outs of both charts nearby while I’m working in Illustrator. I’m careful to select my “paints” from paper rather than screen. In practice, it turns out that my basic digital paintbox is plenty, most of the time. It’s only when I’m specifically wanting an “in-between” color that I turn to the expanded paintbox — or if I want to build a sequence of colors that shifts more gradually.

Greeting Cards 2023

By sven

On December 16, 2022

In Greeting Cards

This will be our fifteenth year of sending out birthday cards that feature original art. I needed some change in order to keep myself interested. So, this time around I set aside my paintbrush and explored making vector artwork. The basic DNA for all these designs came from playing with one of last year’s cards, Public Access Xanadu: 1980 Timeslip Broadcast.

4. And All Around Me, My Garden of Stars

(Title inspired by the song Garden of Stars by Brian Eno, from the album FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE.)

Coloring Book Experiment

By sven

On December 15, 2022

In Greeting Cards, Paintings

From 2009 through 2022, I completed fourteen seasons of birthday card paintings. But I confess, this fall I had some trouble mustering enthusiasm for another round.

The idea to do new art using Adobe Illustrator was intriguing. I’m still a novice with the software, and enjoy learning things. Also, it could be a step toward turning card art into animation. But I know friends really like the hand-painted designs; a few have kept collections of all the ones I’ve sent. I worry that digital art won’t carry the same emotional weight.

Before diving in with both feet, I decided to try a hybrid: making my underlying geometry in Illustrator, then coloring and embellishing it with traditional paints.

“Hybrid” and “geometry” sound fancy. But there’s no way around it…

This looks like a coloring book.

I explored a couple of different approaches, trying to obscure the machine-precise stars, circles, and rays. Crosshatching was promising. And it seemed like color gradients might be helping. I wouldn’t send this experiment to someone as a birthday card — but as a piece of ephemera, I kind of like the mix-and-match aesthetic.

After a couple hours, I set the test aside.

This coloring book concept doesn’t seem like a good basis for a series. Even if crosshatching and gradients panned out, wouldn’t I need to go back into Illustrator to build additional geometries? I suppose I could just decorate this one design in different color schemes — but that seems pretty tedious.

Having now built concentric stars for both Public Access Xanadu and the coloring book experiment, I felt ready to try my first real improvisation in Illustrator.

I try to treat birthday card art like visual jazz. I like how the 5×7″ picture frame can usually be filled in a single sitting… Letting the colors and forms reveal themselves moment-by-moment, with basically no advance planning.

This first improv barely merits the name. Mostly, I just added colors to the recycled stars. Plus repetitions in the background of a single element at different scales. But, oh, the colors! So rich! And there’s proof of concept here that I can build complexity. I know I can do better — but in a pinch, I’d be willing to put this image in an envelope.

Decision made. I’ll gamble on something unfamiliar but exciting. The next round of cards are going to use vector art.

Xanadu as Vector Art

By sven

On December 14, 2022

In Greeting Cards, Paintings

The greeting cards I made for 2022 got me to thinking about vector art.

How do you draw a star shape? I used to break out a compass, ruler, and protractor every time. Very fussy. Last year, I finally realized I could use Adobe Illustrator to make a template: stars in different sizes that I could cut out and trace as needed.

Even with this template, my painting titled “Public Access Xanadu: 1980 Timeslip Broadcast” took long time to make. It’s my least favorite design from the batch, but ate up the most hours. Every one of those straight lines had to be carefully paralleled with my brush, acrylic dabbed into countless tiny angles.

3. Public Access Xanadu: 1980 Timeslip Broadcast

Mind drifting while in the painting-trance, I imagined these rainbow stars as neon animation at the start of some late night TV show from the 1980s. In my fantasy, a signal from that mysterious broadcast slips through a rip in time… And some lone insomniac, flipping through channels in a darkened apartment, accidentally receives an impossible message from another era.

I like it when stories come to me while I work. And I like giving my paintings titles that provoke curiosity and imagination.

Still, after completing Xanadu, I had to ask myself: Why did I do that in paint?

I think viewers attribute special value to things that have been hand-painted. But precise geometry can be accomplished much more easily with a computer. I’d taken a first step in that direction by making the star template. And my neon fantasy really made me want to see this particular design in motion. So, as an exercise, I decided to make a reproduction using vector art.

The vector version of Xanadu is faithful. But inspiring? Not so much.

However, what I discovered underneath Xanadu was exciting!

At some point, I turned off visibility for the top layers of the composition. Underneath, I found that all my developmental drafts had quietly piled up into a chaotic tangle. Compelling. And not something I could have ever conceived of, had I been working in paint.

This accidental composition made me wonder: What if I tried doing all my greeting cards for 2023 in Illustrator?

Greeting Cards 2022

By sven

On December 13, 2022

In Greeting Cards, Paintings

I started creating hand-painted birthday cards for friends back in 2009.

Making lots of small, single-sitting paintings was a great exercise. But sending original art to every individual was unsustainable. The following year, I switched over to scanning my paintings and making reproductions with our home office color laser printer.

Typically now, I do five designs each year. That allows me to send a different painting to all the members of the largest family on my mailing list — and have one more, set aside for New Year’s cards. Here are the designs that went out during 2022: