NYC Greeley Square
If you’ve ever scrolled through a professional photographer’s Instagram account, you’ve probably noticed that each account has its own aesthetic and loose color palette. Even beyond photography accounts, most people who use Instagram casually develop somewhat of an aesthetic. One of my favorite things to do to challenge myself when I make art is to use color palettes that other people have already curated in their own content to recreate their photographs in my drawing style. While doing this, I discovered that a company called had Colorkuler developed a free online tool at colorkuler.com that takes the username of an existing Instagram account and determines the color palette of the page based on all of the public posts on the page, as well as one primary color for the whole account. I’ve personally noticed that almost every account is given a shade of gray as its primary color.
For this piece, I decided to use the Colorkuler tool to get the color palettes of four New York City photography accounts - @samhorine, @misshattan, @empirestatebldg, and @centralparknyc. I combined the color palettes from each of these accounts to then draw an image of New York City based on a photograph I found online.
This challenge proved to be much more difficult than I expected since most of the colors Colorkuler pulled from the four Instagram accounts I used were grays or very dark, unsaturated colors. These colors worked fine for the buildings in the background that are faded out by fog and light, but for the bright colors of the signs in the foreground and closer to street level, I had to improvise with the brighter colors I had and leave those parts of the picture more sketchy and abstract.
Upon reflection after completing my drawing, I should have realized accounts that mainly photograph buildings would have primarily gray and unsaturated color palettes, but I assumed that the primary color determined by Colorkuler was almost always a shade of gray because that is just the average of all the various colors on the color spectrum. I do think that the drawing turned out well and looks similar enough to the original photograph to be recognizable, but I wish I had more bright reds and blues to work with because I think they would have added more liveliness to the sky and street level, rather than the dull, rainy day look I ended up with.
