Is there a way I can color this pattern on my computer?
I found this pattern that I wanted to be able to reproduce, for no particular reason other than that I like it and because I thought it would be a good exercise for the Geometer’s Sketchpad program.
I followed the instructions and could reproduce the pattern, provided that I did not try to color it in. Creating the initial pattern takes a bit of work, but is fairly straightforward. Tiling is relatively easy. I combined two triangular patterns to create a parallelogram, and then it is just a mater of tiling parallelograms. The problem, as you can see, came when I tried to color the pattern.
I looked at another geometry drawing program, Geogebra, and it treated colors the same way. To handle overlapping regions, both programs work with layers and opacity. I can give separate colors to the circular regions and the triangle, but I can’t keep them from blending. Is there some program that just allows you to replace the colors in a region by an overlapping region, without doing any blending? It seems like such an obvious way of doing things.
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I might be right out the ball park here, as I don’t make patterns as such. But I use Gimp, do you have Gimp? If so it is very easy to color things, by using the colorize function. You can also use layers to add colors to your base image.
I could try Gimp. Does it let you overlay one color on top of another without blending. For example, if I have a blue shape overlay a yellow one, I want to see blue and not green in the overlap.
Yes it would. You could could play with the layers, opacity, and modes. For example keeping it on ‘normal” would keep the color more true. Soft light more subdued. The only time it would blend is when you use the blur functions. I’m not too up to RGB and so on , but those functions are there too.
Couldn’t you do it with a straight fill? The ancient and primitive graphics program that I use lets me pour solid color into a bounded area. It doesn’t have anything as fancy as layers. I could easily do what you’re trying to do, whereas I would not be able to accomplish blending.
In fact, I just tried it. I captured your image, and with a few clicks I made the alternating elements solid white and solid gray, with no triangle outlines showing. I can’t believe current software can’t do this.
Some of these programs are just too sophisticated for their own good. I will have to try one of the more straightforward ones.
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It took about two seconds to do it in Photoshop with the eye-dropper and paint bucket tool.
I don’t have Photoshop, but nicely done!
@LostInParadise Gimp is poor mans photoshop :) You can do it just as easily in there too.
I was looking at Gimp. Is there a way that I can specify the center point of circles? Or did @johnpowell somehow import my file into Phtotoshop and edit it from there? I did not try doing an import
That’s what I did, too, @johnpowell, and got the same result. I’m still stubbornly using Paint Shop Pro 4, which was laughably old ten years ago. I even put the turkey on Cate’s head
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and the cranberry on her ear with that.
I downloaded Gimp. Never having worked with anything like this before, I chose the bucket fill tool to see if it would do what I wanted. It did! I don’t know how the program was smart enough to determine the outlines, but it stayed completely within the lines.
Thanks all!
@LostInParadise Glad to hear it worked out. Gimp is also really useful for photo manipulation IMO. I use it all the time and it makes a world of difference and you really dont need to do much which is nice for beginners. Don’t know how often you take pictures but next time open one in Gimp and go to “Colors”, “Auto” and then “White Balance” and then try “Colors”, “Auto”, “Color Enhance”. Its pretty amazing how it can take an ok picture and make it awesome.
@LostInParadise Great! if you need any help or are stuck shoot me a PM I will help out :)
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