Prompt 3: Moonstone
Prompt 4: Hematite

Black and white. Well, as far as the stones are concerned, bluish white and dark steel. To get an achromatic version of brown128.jpg, one can use Microsoft Picture Manager. The "color" tab has at the bottom a thingy that affects the saturation of the colours of a graphic; and, if the tab is shifted all the way to the left, the muting goes to the extreme, resulting in shades of black, grey, and white.



Not that that's how I started. Rather, I used the doohickey on GRSites.com, which produced darker/lighter and muted/saturated versions of each colour shift in a matrix of variants. I quickly found that it was fairly easy to produce very dark colours, though there was a tendency for the result to have considerable areas of black in the pattern. Here, for example, are brown/black, purple/black, and blue/black variants.



This set me the challenge of producing something that looked truly black. Or more accurately (bearing in mind that I still wanted the graphic to be patterned), black with dark grey. Achromatic variants were the answer; and you can see three versions below. The first is a lightly marked variant, where the feathering has the sort of effect you might see in a damask tablecloth (though tablecloths aren't usually black!); and the other two are increasingly contrastive so that the graphics have broadly-marked, easily discernible charcoal & black patterns.



Now, you might think that getting white variants would be just as straightforward. Oddly, it was not. When I simply tried lightening the graphic, I either found that areas went blankly white, with the pattern missing altogether, or else I got variants with the pattern clearly marked, but in rather too dark shades of grey for the result to be truly white, often with coloured tints remaining from the variant I'd been modifying. I was looking for something resembling a fancy white tablecloth. Instead, I was getting things like this:



All very well as far as they went. Quite effective, in fact, in their own way. However, it took me a long time before I finally managed—tackling the problem from different directions—to achieve the white damask look I wanted. In the end, since I was working from different source variants, the results looked a bit different each time. Here are three of them:



I suppose technically they're really palest silver grey and white; but there has to be some measure of off-whiteness to carry the pattern. (If you can't see the difference side by side here, try opening them in three tabs and quickly looking at each of them.)

There remains only to add some graphics in grey tones. I mentioned at the beginning that one can achieve this with pretty well any type of variant by desaturating its colours. This works best with multi-coloured graphics where there is a difference in the darkness of the colours involved: if you start with strong blue and fuchsia, the graphic will come out pretty flat; but, if you start with red and yellow, the red will turn to dark grey and the yellow to pale grey.

Sometimes, though, I didn't mute the colours all the way to achromaticity. Using chromatic greys (i.e. warm and cool greys) in part or all of the design can be very effective in making some sections pop.






Previous Days:
Prompts #1 and #2 (Amber and Topaz)
Prompt #2 (Rose Quartz)
Prompt #3 (Garnet)