I've been busy uploading genealogy data and photos to Ancestry.com...and playing fiddle nearly every day, and not wishing to bore anyone with the details, that is what I have been up to, but with the bulk of my tree uploaded, I will be blogging more often. Infinite blessings!

My maternal ancestors took lots of photographs. Between my two aunts and my mother there are at least four large photo albums, the albums themselves turn of the century. There are also the photographs in small, hinged, velvet lined cases (the cases made of molded varnish and sawdust), pinched in brass frames to hold the tintypes, or as the picture above, an ambrotype (1852-1865, collodion positive: one side of a very clean glass plate is covered with a thin layer of collodion, then dipped in a silver nitrate solution), often hand tinted like mine above, pinched in a brass or copper frame with another layer of glass over the top to protect it. What occurred to me this afternoon, looking at some of these old photos, was how odd it was that my ancestors, before the 1920's at least, didn't have the convenience of owning a camera, a camera phone to take a photo at a moment's notice, and had to make a special trip into town, in their "Sunday" clothes to have these photos taken, quite often to their discomfort, and most likely a costly thing for their day and yet they had so many photographs taken, many of them (in the photo albums at least) had been identified by my great-grandmother before she died. Having done genealogy, they were indispensable resources. As one of their descendants, I appreciate how important family must have been for them to take so many pictures, how they must have had some sense of preserving a history. Viewing them for me is like mysteriously peering into a window of the past, and strangely, like some familial or genetic type of collective consciousness.

The photograph is possibly Jane Newton (b. 1824, Co. Cork, IRE.) or Sarah Jane Moore (b. 1838 Co. Derry, IRE.), both a third great-grandmother, taken between 1852-1865, since it is an ambrotype, which is displayed here without it's case and copper frame. It is a beautiful picture, and literally, one of a kind, the only one in existence- they could not reproduce copies with this process since it was an exposure directly to the glass. I love how they tinted her cheeks rosy, and tinted her jewelry with gold. Holding it up to the light, the dark areas are transparent, reddish-brown glass. By 1864, Ambrotypes were fading into obscurity to the popular paper Carte De Visite photographs.

****I posted this lastnight on my Blogger page, and this morning I had a comment from Quinn Jacobson who actually teaches and does wet plate colloidion photography, and he confirmed that my photograph is in fact a "Rubytype", similar to an Ambrotype in process, but it is on ruby glass rather than clear glass, and doesn't have a black varnish or backing on the backside, which an Ambrotype would. I had not ran into the term "Rubytype" in trying to research my photo and searches come up as photography studios with Ruby in their names, or something completely unrelated, so apparently it is a bit rarer than I thought. I posted a responce, asking if he had any more info on it, and likewise if anyone here has a link or more info on the process I would greatly appreciate it.

Not quite sure what I'll do with these. I was playing with my digital camera and upped the contrast when I edited them, and kinda liked the effect with the digital graininess. Granulated Loraine...like a sugar coated, marshmallow Peep.

The past week there has been a few FUN discussions on colour on Gaia with Janet here and Peridot here, not just the synesthetic perceptions of colour that we all have -yes, I think to a degree, we all have this, and no, I don't think I qualify as a synesthete under testing per se, but the idea of say, a colour corresponding to a sound, or instruments having the sound of a particular colour, seeing radiating colours in the moment of... (a cosmic experience, yeah, that's it) ...well, you know what I mean, or the perception of colour with taste or letters, numbers or shapes have never been foreign conceptions to me and fall into the realm of Qualia...aside from that, I am fascinated with our perception of colour, emotions we associate with particular colours, the symbology of colour . I found the Dale Purves lab, Purves a neuro-scientist studying these perceptions with some interactive demos that aside from messing with your mind (mind "farkification"), shed light, colour or sound (or all of the above) on how we perceive colour, movement, sound, etc., "Making sense of sensory information", as Purves says on the website. As for music and colour, I have mentioned it before, but Visual Music is a fascinating website on the subject.

"Qualia" (pronounced /ˈkwɑːliə/) is "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us"^[1]. They can be defined as qualities or sensations, like redness or pain, as considered independently of their effects on behavior and from whatever physical circumstances give rise to them. In more philosophical terms, qualia are properties of sensory experiences.

These are a few of my favourite pigments (to the tune of "My Favourite Things"):


Napthol Crimson, Yellow Ocre, Pthalocanine Blue (Red), Quinacridone Magenta, Vat Orange, Red Oxide, Primary Cyan, Primary Yellow, Primary Magenta, Pthalocanine Green (Blue), Burnt Umber, and Cobalt Blue, aside from white gesso (I don't use "white" or "black" paint) and black gesso (black hole black!), are more or less my must haves in my acrylic palette (pics from Golden Artist Colors- fabulous paint! They'll send you a hand-painted chart!). Of course, the computer monitor doesn't show the vibrancy, richness, and pigment intensity of these colours, especially the Pthalos and the Quinacridone Magenta, the Pthalo Blue (Red) the deepest shade of blue, the Quinacridone Magenta, the deepest shade of magenta, which I use when portraying, warm-blooded skin (the colour of blood), and together make fabulous purples, violets and every shade in between. The Pthalo Green (Blue), another pigment rich paint, mixed with other colours gives the full range of greens. I prefer Napthol Crimson (Light) which gives a truer red, not like the orange-red typical of cadmiums that muddy, giving a fuller range of reds, or I mix Primary Yellow and Magenta for red. The primary Cyan, Yellow, and Magenta are the basics, must-haves for me.
I think I could sit around and mix colours and look at them half the day, literally, "watching the paint dry" perfectly amused and entertained...I'm sure that sounds nuts to some folks.

My favourite colours: Magenta- blood, warmth, heart, passion. Raspberry-wellbeing, the flavour of Raspberry Chicklets, contentment. Purple- mystical, deep, mysterious, enveloping, melancholy. Chartreuse- eccentric, bright, new, pungent. Split-Pea Soup Green, Apple Green- growth, nature, the feeling and smell of walking on cut grass. Salmon Pink- sex, skin, warm, bright, youth. Mauve (Red Oxide mixed with Quinacridone Magenta)- mournful, subdued passion. and Teal (like the Pthalo Green with a little white)- deep, mysterious, watery. Indigo (Pthalo Blue) depth of depths, mysterious unknown, atmospheric, space. Bubble Gum Pink- sex, playful, youthful, joy. Sky Blue- ethereal. Red Oxide and Reddish-Brown- earthy, spicy.

I think it would be nifty to have t-shirts printed with my favourite colours displaying the CYMK/RGB numeric values for whatever mood I'm in.

What's your favourite colour(s)? Feel free to leave a comment. Too bad we cannot leave colour swatches with comments (:

There was Harold and his purple crayon, then there was SUPER VECTOR GIRL with her pen tablet of fury! Sexy Benday dots! Roy Lichtenstein would be proud! I had fun with tweaking my icon, which I originally intended to look like this, but was still new at the Inkscape thang. With SVG, I can take a previously created image and create countless transformations, since every line, object, shape, etc., is editable. I created the dot pattern first (it isn't a filter), and as I didn't have a way to turn the dot patterns by degree which is how one gets the composite colours, I had to eye these, and I used CYMK (cyan-yellow-magenta-black), but also red and dark blue, which is also commonly used in Benday dot/ halftone printing, varying the dot size and transparency of the colours, and offset some of the areas to give it that newspaper comic strip quality.