How I did: Color Cubes RGB and CMYK

RGB, a photo by Ragoem on Flickr.

CMYK, a photo by Ragoem on Flickr.

I'm getting several questions by mail lately on how I did these photo's of Melanie (RGB) and Annemijn (CMYK).

The whole idea behind this was: make for both color systems cubes and put the same model into al four cubes. Forming one big cube. Rinse and repeat for the other color-system.

Groen, a photo by Ragoem on Flickr.

I already had done a serie with colored cubes, "Groen" on the right is one of the photo's out of this serie. But if I wanted to use the cubes from this serie I had one big problem; the six cubes are made out of cloth in six differerend colors and than hung in a frame. So they are not square. And only the floor is hard, so the model couldn't lean against the walls of the cube.

To make more use for other shoots of the cubes, we did not want to make them very small, but as big as possible. So we had to search for tall models and we found a tall one (1.85mtr) at the local supermarket, and she had an even taller friend who also wanted to model for me.
We made the cube (yes, made only one) to fit Annemijn in the way I wanted. Meaning she could just get her leg straight in the cube. Now the problem was what to do with the colors, make one or more cubes, paint them the right color, make some sort of covers for the cubes. What was practical and even more important, how much would it cost. We decided on one cube (110x110x110cm) made out of 8 or 12 mm plywood and a pine frame on the back to make it stiff and to clamp the five pieces together. First we wanted to paint the cube but that would main one shoot, paint, a week later next shoot, etc, etc. this would make atleast eight weeks work sanding and painting and at the end one color cube. So my dear wife offered to make me 40 (8 colors with 5 panels) covers which would fit all five panels. So we could do two colors in one day and a whole serie in two saturdays. So all eight color were done in four saturdays.

After the photo-shoots where done, we made several sets of cubes with differend themes.
They were merged together in to photoshop to form the end cube, where I also made the colors more RGB/CMYK.

Two of the results can be seen above.