#17: Grab a Gradient
Don’t miss out on the middle bits.
Instructions
Look for gradients around you—transitions from one color to another.
Pay attention to the steps in color between the beginning and end.
Create a gradient using a material that works for you—pencils, t-shirts, condiments, whatever!
Be patient and keep trying. It may not be easy—and that’s where the good stuff is.
Huh the Ombre?
Beginnings and ends are easy to notice—the kickoff, the culmination, the climax, the burial. The in-between? Not so much. The subtle shifts in understanding, the not-quite graceful movements of the body learning a new dance step, the repeated Wednesday morning run quietly building endurance that will not be evident until race day. The vague episode 5 element that doesn’t make sense until **AHA!** the finale.
Nuance and transitions are hard to capture, both in life and in art—which makes it important to attempt to train the eye and hand to do so. Electoral maps (and American politics) seem more easy to comprehend when lumped into “red vs blue” narratives rather than the “majority of decent people versus outlier maniacs and/or 20 people hoarding resources.”
Gradients come in and out of vogue in logos and information design. Some of the COVID trackers utilize gradients, though it fails to capture the utter devastation, the terror of the in-between, and the anxiety of the “maybe this could possibly be the ... well, let’s not get our hopes up” phase. Purple = Very VERY bad = actual thousands of humans lives lost? Does not compute. But neither do raw numbers.
Image: NYTimes.com COVID tracker.
Getting (Not So Good) at Gradients
I’ve never been good at gradients, and am still pretty much crap at them. When Photoshop arrived and there was the ability to click-drag-click-DONE, there was even less reason to sit quietly and shade. Maybe it’s undiagnosed ADHD, or laziness, but I’ve never taken the time. I’d be a terrible drag queen since apparently 75% of painting a face is blending, powdering, blending again.
One of the easiest ways to get familiar with gradients is to simply look up. My pal Jacob has done an ongoing series of “sky gradients” on Instagram that are lovely, and he wrote a piece on the Atlantic website that explains the concept. Seriously, go read it.
In preparing for this post I tried repeated techniques for creating gradients—a YouTube video on blending with colored pencils was somewhat useful, and another video on marker transfers was not. I got some okay results, and a lot of mess.
Image: Try, fail, try again.
I never really found a process that felt “easy” or “useful”, and even got to the “maybe I just skip a blog post and maybe this is the end” moment. And perhaps that’s the point? Getting comfortable in the uncomfortable phase of learning, and still refusing to quit or make it a story about our failings is the key. So try out different techniques, materials, and practices until you get fluent enough to know what you would like to continue with. Give it time. Allow yourself to stink.
And also, don’t forget to look up.
Image: A good gradient in the wild.
As Daniel Kaluuya said in his Oscar speech:
“There’s so much work to do… and I look to every single one of you, we’ve got some work to do… (but also) We’ve got to celebrate life. We’re breathing. We’re walking. It’s incredible…. Peace, Love, and Onwards.”
**** The bottom part *****
You made it from the beginning, through the middle, and to the end. Congrats!
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