Questions beget questions

Last time I showed you a variety of photos that showed elements of design.  Line, Shape & Texture.  I  have been looking at

As you probably know I am fond of using neutrals, duck egg blue, turquoise and shades of orange and rust in my work.  One suggestion on the course, Essence of Identity, was to look at what coulour your clothes are and what your home looks like.

Ignore the bright red splurge - a bit of an aberration!  But the rest!

 

Next, photos of the inside of our house next to photos of my recently finished map pieces.

 

 

 

And a reminder of textile pieces and a paper collage which are some of my favourite pieces.

 Next random photos from our canal walks and parts of the canal inspired wall hangings.

The canal pieces are very obviously green although there is rust and a pale blue.  Looking at the previous photos and then this last one raised a question.

Could I have done the canal hangings in my favourite colours?

My thinking continued with looking at favourite or influencing artists.  I also looked back to 2017 when I was asked the same question by Christine when I had a mentoring session with her.

2017
Cas Holmes
Hilary Beattie
Wendy Dolan
Angie Hughes
Christine Chester

2023
Mixed Media Artists
Deborah Danelley
Seth Apter
Roxanne Evans Stout

Textile Artists
Christine Chester
Eszter Bornemisza
Amanda Hislop

Quite a difference over 6 years.  These 6 artists use some if not all of the elements and principles of design that I recognise in my work.

Colour   Line   Geometric shape   Texture   Contrast

Here are a couple of A5 collage pieces I've made with magazine pages.

These are some of the questions I’m asking myself as a result

• Should I use colours I like or colours appropriate to the subject matter? 
• Do I need a theme for making a series of work? If so what? 
• What shall I do next now that I've finished all the pieces I need for Eclectica exhibitions in 2023?

 Answers on a postcard please!

Although comments in the comments box below would suffice!

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

The Colours of Covid-19, 2020

I wrote this for a writers group I belong to.  It's my take on colour and may not match the purist's psychology of colours.

What colour is Covid-19? Is it red because there is danger in contracting it? Red as a warning to stay socially distant?

Red is a passionate colour. We think of hearts and Valentines. But too much red around us will make us irritable and angry. Too much Covid does that too!

What would you choose as the colour of lockdown? I think it’s grey. Any number of shades of grey (not just 50!) For some it will be dark grey leaning towards black as they drift into depression. For others life will be another shade of grey. 

Grey fog, brain fog, life that feels like a dank, dark, late November afternoon. 

The Spring and Summer have passed in glorious technicolour but in the main our lives have stayed grey.

But there’s always hope!

Hope is vibrant. Hope is yellow. The sun. A light. A candle flickering in the darkness. The pulse of the beam from a lighthouse in the night.

Yellow is optimistic and cheerful, uplifting and enthusiastic. We all need a bit of yellow. We all need hope. Hope for the future.

And when this is all over there will be blue. Not the Blues – beautiful songs as they are. But the freedom of blue.

The ocean. The sky. Freedom to meet. Freedom to travel. Freedom to hug!

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Some Autumn Colour

No matter what is going on, the seasons change.  Autumn is here with lots of colours.  The theme for our photography group was Autumn colours.

I had decided that I wouldn't take trees this time as I have taken so many over the years.  But just in case you're missing colourful trees, here are a couple from Westonbirt in 2015.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Missing inaction

Spot what I did there!  In the blog title!  The phrase should be 'missing in action'.  I have been missing from my blog but no action!  In fact, lots of inaction.  On June 8th I fell flat on my face and broke two fingers on my right hand.  I have spent the time since having various hospital and dental appointments and my hand has been trussed up like this:

It meant that I had to cancel virtually all of the workshops I was intending to be at including a three day class with Cas Holmes.   I have spent four weeks sitting resting and being waited on.  Thank goodness for Kindle Unlimited.

I decided that I would attend a planned two day workshop on colour organised by Textile Explorations.   Even if I only sat and listened!

Please bear in mind that I took the photos with my left hand!

Julia Triston was teaching the workshop.  We started by talking about colour and then naming as many colours of green that we could think of.   Then we had to paint 6 of the colours from memory.

Julia laid out all our squares and it was fascinating to see how we each perceive colour and also the difference different media makes.

Then we moved on to making true primaries with whatever media we had brought with us.

We talked about warm and cool colours and made collages from torn magazine papers.

There were more exercises to do from these collages but I didn't manage to get them done.  And I was pretty exhausted having got this far.

Next day we looked at the proportion of colours in an image of our choosing.  Then Julia suggested we did a thread wrapping of those proportions but I did mine with paint chips instead.  Fortunately Julia helped me with the cutting and sticking.

Then we made a collage in the exact proportions of the original image.

At this point I should have continued with an exercise in fabric but stopped.  I was pleased that I managed as much as I did.

I hope to finish the exercises once I have the use of my right hand.  And I will return to regular blog posts.  Typing with my left hand only is tiring and laborious.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Autumn

Today I thought I would do a simple blog post sharing some of the photos I've taken of Autumn colour this year.  These are all taken in our back garden and I was trying to catch how the light played with the leaves.  Some of them are more successful than the others.

 

If you want to see more Autumn colour checkout my blog post about our visit to Westonbirt Arboreteum a couple of years ago.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Colour Theory Journal

I have talked about colour theory and the start of my colour theory journal.  Today I'm going to show the work I have been doing in the colour journal.

However first I wanted to share this post with you: My Unique Colour Story.  This was a class I did at The Festival of Quilts last year and had forgotten about until I was looking for some photos for another blog post.

Today's post is a bit disjointed - sorry.  I feel like I'm just throwing bits at the page but I hope it will be helpful.

Here's a really useful website if you want to be able to identify the colours in your photograph to be able to turm it into art: Snap Your Colors. (Sorry about the quality of my example)

An interesting blog post I found Expressing with colour and another series of really good blog posts on colour theory.  And here's my Pinterest board.

And now back to my colour theory journal.   I have used different makes of paint which has worked better than I thought.  In the online class Pam Carriker suggests only using one make of paint but doing several of these journals for all the different paint makes that you have.  I probably won't ever do that but I may try it with my Inktense crayons and bars.

Front cover

Still lots of space to fill and colour wheels to complete.

I bought the class as an online video but I have just found a companion guide that is downloadable.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Continuing with colour theory

Last week I talked about colour theory and showed you a sneak peek of the journal I made from the Pam Carriker online class.

When I was preparing my journal I only had six of the colours I needed to make a colour wheel.  These are Dylusions acrylic paints.  For the journal I chose three colours - the instructions were for four colours.  I rarely do exactly what the tutor says.  Mind  you in this case it was that I didn't have the 4th colour.   I mixed the acrylic paint with some water in some spray bottles.

Remember the colours on the colour wheel last week?   The colours above are Squeezed Orange, Fresh Lime and London Blue.  According to my colour wheel they match Yellow-Orange, Yellow-Green and Blue respectively.  The other 3 colours I didn't use are Lemon Zest, Vibrant Turquoise and Crushed Grape which match Yellow, Blue-Green and Red-Violet.

Journal Preparation
I thought I had followed the instructions for putting the paint on the pages

but when I went back to the video I found I hadn't  So I did the backs of the papers the correct way.

When you fold the pages and sew the journal together you get spreads like this.

When I went to Art from the Heart I bought some of the missing colours and set about making my own colour wheel.  Ideally you would do this with only one make of paints and do separate colour wheels for all your different makes of paint.

I set the paints around my colour wheel and the red and Blue-Violet were wrong so I rummaged around and found some Golden paints that were okay.  In fact I might go through all the Golden paints I've got to see if I could do this exercise just with Golden.

Then I drew round a template to get the large circle and I found this piece of plastic canvas and worked out where the middle of the large circle was and measured where I needed to make my lines.

I used a pencil and ruler to draw the lines.

I made pencil notes of the paints as I painted in the segments

When the paints were dry I wrote the colours on the wheel and cut it out.

After I had made my colour wheel I decided I would use the other colour to make a page for the journal.  I'll show you that in my next post.

And look what I found on YouTube via Pinterest

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice