Analog Process

One of my interests that I don't talk about a lot on the blog is human color vision. Cones, the cells that detect color, do not simply pick up red, green and blue. It's more like this:

thanks, Wikipedia

 ...where 700nm is pure red, and 400nm is deepest violet. Two things I find interesting about this are 1. we see that certain colors and combination of colors "peak" in perceived intensity, and 2. there is a high degree of redundancy between cones, that is your red cones pick up some orange, yellow, green etc. This redundancy gives humans an advantage over modern digital cameras when it comes to color vision: we can see a wide range of wavelengths, whereas cameras rely on the RGB color model. This means that certain color phenomena such as fluorescence cannot be photographed, only seen.

Guessing from my previously paragraph, you can probably see where I'm going: I've been working with highlighters fairly intensely for the past month, but they don't photograph well. I'm sharing anyway.

All of these drawings are fairly small. After recruiting some volunteers this afternoon (thanks frakbuddy and weh) I tried a larger drawing today, and I'm pleased with the result:

webcams, 36"x12", highlighters on gesso/MDF