While Pantone is a widely used color matching system, it is also an artistic inspiration. Graphic Designer Andrea Antoni uses it to match the colors of landscapes and cityscapes with Pantone palettes. He travels and takes photos of scenery and cities, and finds Pantone colors in these scenes. Later on, he digitally adds his hand holding a matching Pantone swatch for each image and turns travel images into unique memories.
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan) Andrea shared with DIYP that his project started as a fun, and he started off “without any purpose but offering a pleasant glimpse of the world.” The idea came a few years ago when he would publish a Pantone color of the day to match the color of the sky above his home. But after a while, the color became a palette, and a new project was born.
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan) If you search Instagram for #STAILtone, you’ll find over 100 images of landscapes and cityscapes, even an occasional portrait Andrea made in combination with Pantone swatches. Andrea takes the photo first, and then he adds the matching Pantone swatch in Photoshop. He points out that he enjoys playing in Photoshop, so he mirrors the images and plays with them. Sometimes he changes the colors to end up with a surreal cityscape or panorama, such as this one:
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan) Andrea points out that he is not a photographer, but a person who just has fun using Instagram. After all, his primary occupation is graphic design. Even though he creates lots of Pantone-inspired images, he says he posts them among other images because he would be bored to publish only this kind of photographs.
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan)
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan)
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan)
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan)
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan)
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan)
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan)
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan)
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan)
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan)
A post shared by Andrea “Style1” Antoni (@stailuan) Although some of the photos have colors changed, many of them are only photoshopped in terms of adding the hand and mirroring the image. And while Andrea publishes other great work as well, I find his Pantone project interesting and pleasant to the eyes. If you’d like to see more of his work, head over to his website and follow him on Instagram.