4. Iguanawatching

There’s software to make the colours on your monitor (or printer, or projector) better match the colours in the original drawing.

            One reason why that’s a good idea is that all digital artists have acute hypercashia, a condition characterized by too much cash.  Selling us still more software helps by relieving us of a few wads of the green pain.

            Then again, we do line up to shell out ridiculous sums for some things, such as for our ink:  My printer uses Epson’s UltraChrome K3 Ink, even though the K3 is short for You have to sell three of your kidneys to afford this ink.

            Another reason to go for colour management software is the very fact that they work to uniformize the display of colours across devices.  Remember from 1930s Europe how uniformization is just what the Führer ordered—

Still we do like some things uniform, such as the texture of our paper.

            But the third reason is that, without such software, colours move when we move from monitor to monitor.  We can’t have colours move, of course, we can only have colours that stand quite still.  We want to kill anything that moves.

            Isak Dinesen writes how once, in Africa, she killed a thing with colours that moved:

In the Reserve I have sometimes come upon the Iguana, the big lizards, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a river-bed.  They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring.  They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window.  When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones, the colour seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet’s luminous tail.

Once I shot an Iguana.  I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin.  A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten.  As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete.

Stop shooting the Iguana.