This guide will step you through the tools available and give instructions on how to build a palette.

Colour Picker Modes.

rgbDesigner has six colour picker modes that allow you to choose colours for the main palette:

1. rgb:r - rgb swatches with a set red value selected from the bottom control strip.

2. rgb:g - rgb swatches with a set green value selected from the bottom control strip.

3. rgb:b - rgb swatches with a set blue value selected from the bottom control strip.

4. hsb:hue - hue, saturation and brightness (hsb) swatches with a set hue value selected from the bottom control strip.

5. join - the two secondary palettes are presented so colours can be selected into the main palette.

6. image - load an image from your Photos app and pick colours directly. In the sample shown, the colour picker is in image mode.

7. image selection icon - when the colour picker is in image mode, the image selection icon appears. Tap on it to choose an image from the Photos app.

Main Palette Controls.

8. files - this is where you can save and load your palettes. You also use the files screen to set the two secondary palettes.

9. fill - tap on the fill button to populate the main palette. There are nine fill types that you can use. The current fill type is set on the settings screen.

10. undo (back arrow) - undo the most recent change you have made to the palette / redo (forward arrow) - redo the change that you have recently made. If the redo button is greyed out, this means there are no undo steps to be redone.

11. main palette display controller - a palette is made up of 32 colours, displayed in columns of eight colours. All shows all 32 colours, while the numbers will display a single column at a time.

12. settings - set the various options for how the palette screen operates. This is where you set the fill mode and the display type for the numerical display.

Numerical Display.

13. The Numerical Display shows the values of the current colour, which is displayed with a green border. Display types include rgb(1.0), rgb(255), hsb and hex values.

The last two week of March and the first two weeks of April are the ‘golden hours’ of our year. The flies have died, the snakes are sleepy, the weather is perfect and the days are still long enough. This is the time for Alpine walks so we did Lake Osborne and the Arve Falls walks in the Hartz Mountains. The Silver Banksia ( Banksia marginata ) was in flower and full of raucous birdlife getting their calories in before winter.

People die attempting alpine walks all the time so we took robust precautions such as taking a jumper, making Sahara Sandwiches for our picnic and wearing shoes. These walks are doable for active kids and if you feel they would amuse you there is more info here.

Interior March. The windows are finally in their slots. That was fussy. Even a couple of millimetres out and they don’t rest well on the eye. Lots of faffing about with the sander and plane but anyhoo, finally they’re in and the most of the trim is on the wall. We felt the windows might not be there for ever so installed them using lashings of silicon instead of traditional fixings. This worked better than our wildest dreams and allows for movement in a good way. You will note that these are interior windows and not load bearing.

rgbDesigner March. This month’s palette is informed by our trip to the Hartz Mountains with colours harvested from photos of the atmosphere. The featured generator is ‘stripes’, a simple but powerful tool with lots of options for customisation. The variations in these images are produced by altering the shade width only but as you can see from the screen grab you can also change orientation, mode, width and shade mode. Pretty much endless combos. We like stripes for designing large backdrops for window displays. Striking but neutral.

You can buy rgbDesigner on the Apple AppStore here. Designed for iPad

Writing March. Our resident writer Robert Gowty has had a busy month!

A thought provoking new series on the politics of convenience.

Living Without Running Water (The Politics of Convenience #1)

The End of the World Arts

Living Without Running Water

If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires. Epicurus…

Read more

a month ago · 7 likes · 14 comments · Robert Gowty

https://medium.com/civil-politics/living-without-running-water-a6d07e9fbe3b

Grizzly Man and the Call of the Wild (The Politics of Convenience #2)

The End of the World Arts

Grizzly Man and The Call of the Wild

Preface…

Read more

18 days ago · Robert Gowty

https://medium.com/civil-politics/grizzly-man-and-the-call-of-the-wild-997a3a05866e

A short and weird on “Why a Staycation at the Gormanston Valley Caravan Park Might Be Your Last Vacation (Short & Weird: Rudimentary Structures #4)”

https://medium.com/short-and-weird/why-a-staycation-at-the-gormanston-valley-caravan-park-might-be-your-last-vacation-8da88f4a0e86

Some existential ( isn’t that the word of the month ) extrapolations

Complacently Adjacent (Existential Extrapolations #7)

https://medium.com/@robertgowty/complacently-adjacent-96c4cad69a98

and another fabulous spoken word.

Where Am I? (Spoken word in The Oral Tradition: Tribal Aperture)

Saccharum

The Oral Tradition: Tribal Aperture

To focus is not to limit…

Read more

a month ago · 64 likes · 63 comments · S y l v i A 🌞 K a l i n A, Jozef Cain, Stephen, Alma M., Mark Farley’s wandering’s, pen n. bolsillo, Tangled Words, Laura Catanzano, Robert Gowty, Paul R. Pace, Marissa M. Zhu, Vision2Verse, Sacred Rebelle, kōtare, Camille Brody, Steve Elliott, Ann Lyons, The Monday to Friday Poet, kerri, and L. Cohen

All this without mentioning the war ; )

Our book of the month is Lady Glenconner’s Picnic Papers , a chatty tome that collects the writings of many of Lady Ann’s family and friends on the subject of picnics, and which manages to encapsulate both an elegiac homage to a pre war England, and an insiders view of the new world boom that followed. Some good recipes and some lessons for those who like to learn.

From the picnic reminiscences of Patrick Leigh Fermor…

“The picnic baskets may have contained all sorts of Moldowalkechian wonders - sarmali wrapped in vine leaves, fragrant mititei, chicken croquettes as light as feathers, a sterlet from the Pruth, perhaps, or even, and by the ladleful, wonderful Black Sea caviar from Vâlcov in the Danube delta, on the fringes of Bessarabia; turkey in aspic, almost certainly. Apart from fine indigenous cooking this country seemed to be the meeting point of all that was most delicious in old Russia, Poland, Hungary, Mitteleuropa, France, the Balkans and the Levant. The picnic would have been more likely to start with fierce Moldovian raki than with a milder southern tzuica of distilled plums; excellent white and red wines, stored in tortuous catacombs, would have accompanied it throughout.

The point of departure was an old and many-legended Cantacuzene country house with inhabitants of indescribable charm. It lay at the heart of a once large but now much reduced estate in High Moldovia, and the time was 1939.”

…

“It was a summer of unparalleled beauty and remoteness, but the months passed too fast; the crops were in and the storks were gathering before heading south; and suddenly, not unannounced, the evil omens had begun to multiply quickly, until all seemed black.”

We always take a picnic when we go to the forest. Somewhat less glamorous than Patrick’s but no less delicious.

May the road rise with you

Here’s a selection of wallpaper sets that we used to sell on our old Wix website. In celebration of the joy that is building a website on substack we’re making them free so knock yourselves out.

All the wallpapers are made with our rgbDesigner app and are labelled for ease of use

The first set is called Cloudy Bay Lagoon and inspired by fishing trips to the same.

The second set is called Salamanca after our famous drinking quarter down at the Hobart docks.

The third set is Tinderbox, named after our favourite Marine reserve. This is the set we use. We’ve included a picture of the reserve for your enjoyment.

A quick click around leads us to think that downloading works best on mobile and desktop, not so much with email. Sets include sizes for Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, iMac and Laptop. We’re going to assume that you know how to add wallpapers to your devices but if you’re not sure you can ask DeepSeek ;)

Started February with the Fishers Point walk down at Cockle Creek. Most of the year it’s in the fridge so it was nice to have some warm weather. Just a few souls because it really is the end of the earth. Many of them hiking in bare feet (shrug emoji).

The forest is particularly enjoyable here and some lovely intertidal pools.

If you fancy visiting this incredibly remote place and taking the air you can find some guidance here.

Interior February. The only game in town at the moment is window building. Attempting to maximise the not great light in the workshop, interior windows are the solution. Chunky and a bit squat to match the log cabin aesthetic, they take longer to build than you would expect. So much sanding. I used Tasmanian Oak (Eucalyptus hardwood) from the local hardware so they are heavy as well. Still, coming along nicely.

rgbDesigner February. Robert Gowty, who is also our software engineer, has been working on an update for rgbDesigner over the past month. As well as bringing the interface into line with apple’s latest iPadOS, he’s developed some new generators. Rather than using AI, this app is a professional colour tool that uses HI (human intelligence). We like AI but really it only gives you an opinion. Sometimes this is fine but if you are a colour professional you want TOTAL CONTROL. Obviously this never really happens but rgbDesigner comes pretty close. Here’s our palette for February (soft vibes here atm) and examples of the line grid generators. great for working up some packaging ideas.

You can buy rgbDesigner on the Apple AppStore here. Designed for iPad.

Writing February. So far this month has been action packed.

Robert posted his first spoken word video to youtube and brought the ‘Australian Cadence’ some new fans.

He’s also written a compelling review of “Fragile” by Yes ( Tagline: KING CRIMSON VERSUS YES. THE DARKNESS AND THE LIGHT DO BATTLE. #4) on Medium which you can read here if you do the Medium thing. The Album Cafe publication, which Rob is currently editing, is undergoing a bit of a renaissance at the moment. Worth a look.

A couple more medium moments including a short and weird “Only Push The Button In An Emergency”, and the latest episode of THE “INSERT TITLE HERE” SERIES: PART #3.16, otherwise known as ‘the cucumber man’. These are both member only stories just a heads up.

Our Book of the Month is The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater. She is such a comfort :)

Mind how you go

gowtywood productions

Are websites dead? Who knows. They have begun to seem very clunky though. Also hard to find. Substack seems a refreshing way to both talk to the world, and listen to what the world has to say. Let’s go.

Gowtywood productions is a polymath business with several main activities. These include:

Interior Objects. These can be purchased complete and will be added to the substack as they become available.

rgbDesigner. This is an iPad only tool for design professionals. If colour is your superpower this tool is for you. It’s available on the AppStore here We’ll be sharing some palettes for you as we go.

Writing and Publishing. Our text engineer Robert Gowty has a writing practice that is both broad and wide. You can find his take on everything from album cover art to cucumbers here. He is working on his first novel.

Walking. We spend a LOT of time staggering around, and falling over, in the forest. We share our favourite staggers and falls of the month in our newsletter.