Drawing

David's Collection

Vocabulary: Subjective Color

Subjective Color

Definition In doing research of this word I found two definitions that seemed appropriate:
  1. That color changes in your head independent of how your eyes and brain perceive it. A subjective color is the color is looks because of the way you see it.
    For example, in the morning I go into my closet and grab a black shirt to put on. But when I get outside into the sunlight, the shirt is now navy blue. Two different lighting conditions resulted in my brain perceiving two different colors
  2. Colors that are chosen by an artist without regard to the natural appearance of the object being portrayed.
Artist Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Title Skull
Date 1976
Medium acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
Location The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Source http://www.warhol.org/collection/art/work/1998-1-183/
Example
Comments This piece really meets the second definition, the typical color of a skull is white or possibly a very light yellow, and the table and background colors do not seem natural either. So Andy Warhol was very subjective in his choice of colors. If the purple table and brown background were replaced with much lighter colors, and the to pictures were viewed, side to side the red skull might appear darker to me.
Experiment

I attempted to use Photoshop to change all of the non-skull colors to something else to see if it would effect how I perceive the color of the skull. I am not sure it worked very well, and maybe different colors would work better, or it may be that a web page is not a particularly good medium for this experiment. More experimentation is needed to see if the first definition for subjective color can be achieved with this image.

Experiment