 Hello, artists and first-time visitors. Welcome to Monet Café. Get ready to have a lot of fun here with some color and value optical illusions. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to this channel to keep more art lessons and fun coming your way. So it's time, artists, to put on your lab coats and let's become color scientists and have a lot of fun learning some of the principles and optical illusions of color and value. Now before we get to some neat online optical illusions, I thought I'd share an optical illusion of my own. This was from a video. It's called Warm Versus Cool Colors here on Monet Café, and I literally took pastels. I was showing the difference between warm and cool colors, but a lot of the viewers responded and said, oh my goodness, I could see the pastel color changing as you moved it. Now this is a perfect example of the optical illusions with color and value based on the surroundings. Watch this pastel. The next one I'm going to do is even more noticeable as I move it across the palette and notice how the color changes to have more gray, more blue, more green, depending on what's around it. And here's another one. By the way, I think this is, I know these are Terry Ludwig pastels, but I believe it's called, I believe it's called cool greens, even though you see some blues and purples in there. Watch the color change. Can you see that? It went from kind of a bluish purple to a darker purple to a neutral gray. It's fascinating to see how color and value is affected based on the surrounding colors and values. So let's do some of these online color tests, which will definitely help you to understand why these illusions happen and to help you become a better artist. Some of you may remember the visual trickery and internet sensation about whether this was a blue dress or a white dress and actually the reasoning for some of these color and value illusions is something that many artists have known all along. So let's talk about some of these and have some fun. My patrons on my Patreon page have been enjoying some little color tests and color trivia that I've been giving them and I just recently found this one site called braindin.com with quite a few interesting and fun little color tests. First let's define what a color illusion is. Color illusions are images where surrounding colors trick the human eye into incorrect interpretation of color. Now, they're a lot of fun, but as artists here in Monet Café we can learn when and why these things happen and it will help us to better make choices as artists. Now, I will enlarge some of these and put them in Photoshop, but it gives instructions that you may want to hide some parts of the optical illusions by putting your hands so that you don't get distracted by the rest of the image. So let's start looking at these squares and see if you can see the numbers or letters within. The top left one, you should see 58. The top right, you should see 18. The lower left, wait a second, you should see the letter E and the lower right, you should see the number 17. So if you don't, you might have a little bit of a degree of color blindness. I know some of our members, the ones that have told me they have some of that, they have been men and also too, I've shared with them, don't worry about that. If you've got a degree of color blindness, it can actually be a benefit because it causes you to focus more on value than color, which is something I'm always preaching anyway. Value is really more important and then you can get interpretive with color if you get the value right. All right, here's the famous dress color illusion. Do any of you guys remember this? It was a trick or a visual illusion, optical illusion test where many people saw this dress. It became like people fighting on the internet over what color this dress was. Honestly, I think it's just a really bad photo, but it is, the question was whether it is blue with some little trim on it or white with gold trim. And I was amazed at how many people saw it as white. What do you see it as? I see it as blue and we can do something to actually identify. Now I'm talking about what color is it in this photo? What color it is in life depends on where you put it. You could put the dress in bright light in the sunshine and it probably would appear white or put it in some subdued lighting with some cooler temperatures and it's going to appear blue. Now we understand that as artists, things are different in volume color based on where they are. So let's take a look at this one actually as just this image and it's pretty easy actually to do, just zoom into a particular area and see we're going to isolate the dress in a smaller area without the surrounding color to see what color it actually is within this photo. That was an example of a color optical illusion and this is one with value, the difference in dark to light. And I presented this one on my Patreon page, I think it was last week. And the goal with this one was to identify what value A and B were in the squares on the checker board. Optically, B appears lighter than A, but I did in the example last week, I removed everything except square A and B. They are actually exactly the same value of gray. Isn't that crazy? That's a perfect example of how value is determined or perceived depending on its surroundings. Now here's another one. It's called a white illusion. All gray rectangles are of equal luminance. They mean value there. Although the ones in the dark stripes appear brighter than the ones in the bright stripes. So let me enlarge it. All of these gray squares are the same value. There's one, two, three, four over here and one, two, three, four, five over here. They all are actually exactly the same value. Again this is like the same thing I keep saying over and over again. It's because of what's surrounding it. These appear lighter because there's dark around them. And these appear darker because there's white surrounding it. Let's throw it in Photoshop and check it out for sure. Here I'm just using my selection tool to literally select everything that is not gray, not the gray squares. And looky there. They're all the same value of gray. Isn't that cool? So remember that when you're a painting artist that everything with value and color really depends on what's around it. That might help you learn to choose your values better or differently. All right this one is called Color Cube. Believe it or not the pieces A, B, and C all have the same color. Use any color picker graphic program or simply cover the remainder with your hand to see for yourself. Okay let's look at A, B, and C. I'm going to enlarge it. A, B, and C. Now this one is very dramatic to see how different value and color can be based on surroundings. Doesn't B look I mean just so much lighter than A and C is a little bit lighter than A. So let's throw this one in Photoshop and check it out. Now what I'm going to be doing is literally just using a selection tool and selecting A, B, and C individually and removing everything else around it. All right we have just A, B, and C selected. Let me inverse it and cut everything else out. And lookie there they are exactly the same color and value. That's crazy right? Let me zoom in a little bit more so that you can see it. So we need to remember this as artist that color and value are perceived by what's around it. Some of you may have seen this one. Actually it was recently shared by one of my patrons on my Patreon page and it's really amazing. So I'm not going to put this one in Photoshop but basically if you take your fingers kind of horizontally and you cover up the middle section where A and B meet you'll see that they're exactly the same value. Once again just another amazing illusion. Oh here's a nice one with color. It's called Yellow Dog versus Blue Dog. Both of them are the same color. Oh my goodness let me do this one because this this is really neat. All right here we are with two dogs that appear to be totally different colors but when I remove the background in Photoshop so there you go. I didn't select them very good. I cut off some of their the feet on the bottom one but um anyway that is another crazy awesome illusion right? All right let's do this one called Chess Sets. I think they have a typo in their description. It says the upper set is black and the bottom set is black right? I think they meant the upper set is white and the bottom set is black right? Wrong. Both sets have absolutely the same color just the background has changed. So once again I'm not going to throw that one in the Photoshop but man that is just really amazing how our brains tell us that this top set is light chess pieces and the bottom one is dark chess pieces. All right here's another one called Red versus Green. When you first look at this how many colors do you see? Some might say they see three or even four colors but there are two red and green. This is fantastic. I love this illusion. People usually think they see two shades of red but there's only one. Look closely and you'll notice on one side that white boxes surround the red boxes and on the other side green boxes surround them. Due to the placement of these boxes you get the illusion of different colors. Since white is not considered to be a color it is the presence of all colors in scientific terms. Absolutely right. We can safely say that there are two colors present here. Still don't understand click to enlarge. Let's click this one up and look at it. All right again the same illusion principle. These have white squares surrounding them so they appear a bit more pinkish. These have darker green squares or darker in value green squares surrounding them so they appear a bit more reddish or darker in value. So isn't that just really cool? I love these things. This one's called Gray versus Blue Stripes. Focus on the black dot in the bottom right hand corner and the moving gray stripe will eventually turn blue. All right so try to focus on the black dot and don't look at anything else. And peripherally do you see it? I see it. It's totally a blue box now vibrating on the left hand side. That is just so cool. You know also too there's another thing you can do visually. If you stare at an orange square I can't remember how many seconds and then turn your eyes to look at a white wall. Do you know what color you'll see? You'll see it's complement. You'll see blue. That's why I'm often talking about how the things with the color wheel and the rules they're willy nilly or something that some man just invented. It's something actually that Sir Isaac Newton discovered the principles of the color wheel and it was all based on the rainbow. And Sir Isaac Newton was a Christian. He was a believer and he actually realized that God's design of color had scientific and designed principles. So I find that really cool. All right this is another cool one. It's called lilac chase. Also known as pac-man illusion is another example of after image complementary color like we were just talking about. The complementary color to this lilac color is green. It's opposite on the color wheel. Follow the movement of the rotating pink dot with your eyes and the dots will remain only one color pink. But if you stare at the black dot in the center the moving dot will turn. What color? It's complement green. Let's do this one. So as long as we are just kind of following the the little pink dots around they're pink, right? Now try to isolate the square in the middle. I hope you guys are just like amazed by this because it is so cool. All of a sudden they're green. This is not something that I'm doing a trick with my computer screen. I couldn't possibly know at what point in time you would stare at this dot. I'm also seeing a little green kind of halo effect around them now too. So man, isn't that cool? I hope you guys love this. If you liked these and you want to have some more fun I will include a clickable link to this website in the description of the video. But hold on how does this apply towards painting and pastels and art in general? While these color and value quizzes were fun they actually have a whole lot to do with our color selections and value selections. With regards to pastel painting I decided to use this Paris collection. I just got I'm so excited about this half stick set to put some of these principles to practice when it comes to color selection. Now I've taken two different surfaces black and white and I'm literally going to choose one pastel and I will lay it on each of the two different surfaces. Before I show the result I want to explain too that this is often why it's hard to choose colors online. Looking at your phone, looking at a screen, not only do screens differ but what is around the pastel even within the photo can make a difference. This is the same turquoise color on black and on white. Now let me put them together and you should be able to noticeably see that there is an illusion that the one on black appears lighter in value and perhaps in color than the one on white. And if you'd like to learn a little bit more about how these things apply artistically check out my video here on Monet Café on understanding value. Now my patrons have the longer version but I'll provide a clickable link at the very end here so you can check that video out if you'd like. Alright guys I hope you had a lot of fun. I know I did and as always happy painting!