[ohgodthecat3]

I think he took the wrong message away from his art teacher as I was taught the same thing.

But it was in regards to representing realistic things with paints. As he says shadows usually aren't truly black and painting with a dark blue as your darkener is usually a better idea.

You can use black but when you use it in paintings to darken colors or for your regular darks it regularly stands out to the viewer, black is supposed to be used in very limited quantities in artistic works. (Hell half the time people recommend not buying black paint when starting out but to mix other colors to create a black looking color[1])

This doesn't really switch over to apps and other things as they don't represent any realism but instead try to allow us to focus on specific things which black can be useful.

His example image with a big black square dominating the others is a terrible example and would be better if the bottom was a representation of the layout with black as the darkest color instead of the lighter greys and grey-blues. And what we would see is more contrast but little change in distraction.

[1]: http://painting.about.com/od/colourtheory/a/JimMeadersBlack....

[ianstormtaylor]

OP here: No guys, I didn't take the wrong message away from Mrs. Zamula. I am aware of that "never" is not a word that should ever be taken at face value. The same way that I was aware when Mrs. Zamula forbade us from using "I like" while holding critique. You _can_ use "I like" well while giving a critique, but more often than not it means what will follow is garbage. Just like you _can_ use black, and there are absolutely good places to use it, but more often than not you'd do better with a bit of color in there.

Thiebaud's work and my photograph aren't evidence of anything other than the fact that shadows in most every image you see (whether it be real life, a painting or a photo) are not black. And that you'd be surprised at how saturated the dark colors around you are. Notice how I never said, "Thiebaud's shadows aren't black, so you shouldn't use black." There were a lot of other words in between.

I should have clarified: The black squares actually weren't about dominance at all. I put a large swath of black next to those screenshots because color is relative, and to see how far from black the dark grays in those screenshots actually are, you need a comparison point.

---

My other high school art teacher, Mrs. Totten (they taught as a pair), taught me a good lesson about photography. She would always defer to Mrs. Zamula on matters of photography because she readily admitted she had no photographic skill whatsoever. And she claimed that more people needed to acknowledge that fact, despite having their own digital camera. Well... my name is Ian, and I'm no a photographer.

But lucky for me.. that has absolutely no impact on my argument whatsoever!

[ohgodthecat3]

My comment was going off your entire premise that using black was a nono because that is what you wrote.

We could even see it in your website design because you chose to use a grey font color over black (because I'm guessing you are on a mac and the font rendering works better). However if you look at it on windows it becomes harder to read because it is grey (http://i.imgur.com/CfTYi.png windows screenshot with black and grey)

I said that black can be used to focus in apps and websites and in digital mediums because it isn't realism that we are going for and black actually works really well for this purpose. The idea of using saturated colors is fine but not using black for the sake of it is silly.

Now using black in large quantities is another thing.

[gbog]

I would be interested to know how Chinese classic painting fits in these theories about blackness: it should represent something not to far from half of all paintings ever produced by human beings and theories thereof, and as far as I know its main mode is shades of black ink on white paper.

[ohgodthecat3]

I might have wrote a confusing comment accidentally. The don't use black pretty much comes into play in realism and other art with how people perceive the color black.

It is more realistic to represent shadows and blacks with dark colors as that is what they are but we rarely see black.

Because Chinese painting is rather stylized in is specific way black is a major factor, the same would go for things like comics and comic books and other such things.

[tripzilch]

Well that probably ties in to how I was taught to "don't use pure black" in high school art class: when drawing with India ink and pen.

(BTW I just see on Wikipedia that the Chinese paintings you're referring to are quite different, but I'll tell the story anyway.)

Most of our drawings would be made of shading, which is done by either cross-hatching or stippling. When you'd need a shadow area to be really dark or "black" you weren't allowed to take a brush and simply paint it, no you had to stipple or cross-hatch it until you reached the desired level of darkness. Rather tedious work for large areas and most kids hated it, though I kinda liked "zoning out" doing it.

And you could tell, too. A properly shaded dark area could be really really dark but always have some white specks in between the layers of cross-hatchings. Very subtle, but it would make it look way more "real": we were shown examples of pictures where the darkest shadows (a hole in the wall or something) were painted flat black with a brush, and they'd seem (also literally) "black holes". They'd punch right through the image without any sense of depth-proportion. Obviously, because there wasn't any: you can't shade part of a black hole darker than the other bits.

Describing this, it makes me think of working with DSP/audio applications. Volume is measured in dB, and if you turn it down, you can go to -36dB or -48dB and it's pretty much "silent" (-3dB is half as much power) as long as you play it next to sounds at full volume (0dB). Turn it further down and the software cuts the value to -Inf dB, when there is really no sound ("pure black").

BTW I'm not trying to say that you should never turn a sound all the way "off" in an audio mix :) [I'm not a professional sound mixer], just that the concepts seem really similar. In both cases, our eyes and our ears have a tremendous dynamic range, and they are sensitive to ratios, mostly. Using a "pure black" paint (I think NASA must have some that comes pretty close) confuses those ratios because it "divides by zero", in some sense.

Your example of Chinese classic paintings is interesting though, I think it also shows that tastes and customs in painting vary over the ages. The "don't use pure black" style is really ubiquitous in current-day digital (web/app) design, but it didn't use to be always like that. Nor is "realism" a necessary quality, (Jackson Pollock used pure black and they are the prettiest images before the invention of TV static!).

[quanticle]

That's true, and it's true of black & white art more generally, but even there, you don't have blocks of pure black. You have pure black lines on white or cream-colored paper.