Wheatfield with Reaper and Sun, Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon: Part One

Hellooo, SMW Central! And, man, have I got something for you this time! Yes, van Gogh again— I'm afraid I'll be carrying on like this for a while. The problem is, my list is relatively short (it'll last me 'till just about the end of summer, posting one painting every day), so what I'm going to do is split this paired evaluation up into three parts: one evaluation for the first painting, a second one for the second, and a third one for the two together. That will lengthen your entertainment time a bit, won't it? That is, if you derive any entertainment whatsoever from my rants. Whatever.

Down to business! First, our two lovely paintings by Heer Vincent van Gogh, also part of a series:

Wheatfield with Reaper and Sun

Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon

Although they have faded a bit, we will be using the Wikipedia originals, because of their impeccable quality. Anyways, van Gogh described our painting, "Wheatfield with Reaper and Sun", as "a wheat field, very yellow and very light, perhaps the lightest canvas I have done." Well, some of this we could have gleaned for ourselves, thank you very much H. van Gogh, but all the same he gives some interesting pointers. That bright, pastel yellow, there does seem to be quite a lot of it, doesn't there? Including... the sky. Why? The only time I've seen the sky yellow was during an episode of Doctor Who! Maybe. Well, all it's really there for is to emphasize the total YELLOW of the painting; the yellow grass, the yellow sun, the yellow hills, the yellow... peasant? He did like those peasants. Anyway, the point is, it's there because, well, if you're going to make a painting YELLOW with a capital everything, a blue sky just isn't going to do as well as a yellow one. The sky is bright, and if you're emphasizing a bright color, everything bright had better be that color!

However, we also have those blue mountains in the back. Why blue? Chromatic opposites again! Blue is the opposite of... well, orange, but once again chromatic shift allows us to stuff that blue in there. Perhaps it was purple once; then they would be exact chromatic opposites. But then again, that would make it look like something straight out of a Katherine Lee Bates poem:

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!

Perhaps H. van Gogh was worried about extratemporal plagiarism? But no matter! It is what it is. But still, why blue, besides the whole chromatic opposites dealie? The only time I have ever seen mountains that blue was on the wrong side of the Mexican border. Well, search your inner palettes. What color would YOU have put their? Green is too close to yellow and orange, violet is too far away, and red is too conspicuous! Therefore, the only solution to this is blue, matched to the yellow in its pastel-ness. This, I think, concludes our discussion on colors.

Design! What design can we infer from this? Well, the one thing foremost in the picture is WHEAT. SO MUCH. WHEAT. It coversa very large part of the bottom of the painting, and does a fairly good job of hiding our peasant as well. I imagine that this would be a fun interface screw level mechanic; and, given the negligible amount of colors involved, would do great as a Layer 3 gimmick (but that's not what I'm suggesting Layer 3 for; wait a moment), or as a Layer 2 layer priority thing. Either way, this is fun, screen-obscuring stuff. Behind it, we have a brief stretch of brown ground, serving as something for our character to stand on, obviously Layer 2 stuff, and behind that the yellow hills and blue mountains. I suggest that these both be on Layer 1, alternating each other like the mountains in some of the Chocolate levels in the real game (can't think of a number off the top of my head). Doable, am I correct? And lastly, we have the sun, bright, yellow. What I would do is stick this on Layer three, a perfect circle of reddish yellow, with a one pixel thick ring of orangish yellow directly inside, and the rest of the interior filled in by the pastel we all know and love. This would look great on Layer 3, let me tell you.

That is all on this painting: if you have lots of a color, it dominates everything of its brightness; and its background objects should be its chromatic opposite, with the same saturation; obscuring stuff looks good on Layer 3 or Layer 2 plus priority; and a technique for a Layer 3 sun (which is, incidentally, the name of a hack I'd like to make).

Look forward to the second part of a trilogy!

Snow-Covered Field With A Harrow

To start things off, we can take a look at Van Gogh's "Snow Covered Field With A Harrow. It was hard to find a photo worth anything, because it's either captured using tilt-shift photography (which distorts two-thirds of the painting) or is a flat unrestored picture. We'll be needing the restoration today, because the main object of the picture is color: a bleak, snowy landscape, consisting of proper proportions of blinding white and ice blue. So, without further ado:

Works well, doesn't it? Let's point a few things out.

That blinding white I spoke of? Nowhere to be seen. Almost all of the white in the picture is tinged a not-so-faint blue, as well as being quite gray. We're going for a low-saturation approach here. Notice, however, that as you get closer to the horizon, the landscape gets bluer, and just a bit more saturated.

Also notice that the shadows in this picture are blue's opposite, yellow. Chromatic opposites (colors across from each other on the color wheel) complement each other well, but only when they have the same brightness and saturation (which here is light pastel). For reference, if I remember correctly, in the Windows color picker, the vertical axis in the color square is saturation, and the bar at the right (left?) is brightness.

What can we learn from this? Well, wintry landscapes should be, if you are going for bleak as opposed to vibrant, pastel (low saturation), and medium-light. True white shouldn't actually exist anywhere in the composition, instead replaced by a very light shade of blue. Similarly, true black should only be used in bare outlines, shadows instead composed of complementary yellow (that is, only drag the slider horizontally, not vertically). The picture should darken and saturate towards the top, then, when it breaks into an HDMA gradient, start over again, going from yellow to blue (looking bottom up, because that's the way the player is looking).

Now that we have so nicely postulated on color, let's look at form. The landscape is largely uniform; whatever isn't part of it is a vague, black shape, etched in lines but not quite detailed. There are no clouds; the desolation is complete, nothing offering the consolation of life-giving precipitation. In there place we have these crows, a favorite thing of our dear friend van Gogh's. This would work well with ExAnimation, methinks.

So, we should make our foreground objects very dark, lacking most detail. Our scenery should be sparse, and, likewise, dark and vague. The landscape should be flat, with nothing to to pollute the monotony.

I sincerely hope you enjoy this out-elementalisation of some guy's artistic work, and that your hacking benefits from it!

Vanilla XL Is In A Coma

As it stands, I am unable to work on my hack, Vanilla XL, for a year. This is because I am entering high school, and using a computer will completely ruin my school experience (I want a top-notch transcript: 4.53 grade average, every possible honor given). In spite of this, however, I refuse to quit hacking entirely. I will henceforth, surreptitiously and completely by iPhone, publish a blog on the subject. Don't expect regular updates; for example, next week I will be unable to post, due to a lack of a connection. However, I have lots to ponder on the subject, so I promise to be fruitful!

Right now, though, all I'm going to do is declare all of the tags I will be using. Currently I will make a theme of learning from existing masters of art, most notably van Gogh the Dutchman. I will draw your attention to notable paintings I picked up in the art galleries I've been to— I have a list! Once I've exhausted this, I'll mostly be publishing clever color combinations, flashes of insight, and the occasional graphics set (no telling how I'll do THAT). Oh, and Sonikku has asked me to show him the source of the level generator, which I never adequately demonstrated (due to it being an extremely tedious process). So, I might post improvements to it, once I unearth it.

Otherwise, I'm a mostly silent guy, so you'll have to make do with the loquaciousness in the comments!