Color experiment

Color has always been tough for me… I tend to use analogous color schemes — like yellow-green, green and green-blue, so I can avoid the entire issue!

Color experiment

But I spent quite a bit of time learning – once you can pair value (how light or dark an area is) with color-brightness and contrast, and complimentary colors, the world opens up. I play with all of this in paint first these days – no intention of creating finished or resolved work from them, just little experiments in what works and why, and my color choices in threads need to be ripped out much less now, although I have discovered that what works in thread on a small scale may not work when enlarged — for example, three colors that work as a small face don’t necessarily work together when enlarged to an 8 1/2 by 11 inch piece of work. This seems to happen more in thread than in paint for me, at least right now. Still working that out.

Color experiment

I’ve been trying to learn this academically for a long while now – but the more I read, or even pushed buttons for (online resources follow) the less I understood. It finally took getting a bunch of cheap acrylic paint and doing it myself to actually grok it. My experiments may be ugly, but they did what they were intended to do! (I used quite a few of them as backgrounds in my journal, or I’d post more of the photos here.)

Indigo:

I’ll admit it. I failed horribly. And I’ve had more than a week to find it.

Indigo is a color I love – a deep blue with a hint of purple in it. It is also not a color you see often, at least in the form I expect it. My midnight blue hipscarf comes close — in fact, it’s the color the International Order of the Rainbow for Girls (IORG) used when I was a member – it annoyed me then, too – there’s no purple in it. Hence, to me, it’s blue.

My irises have indigo in them as I remember — they haven’t bloomed yet. I did not think I would fail to find a color I love so much. I was wrong.

Has anyone else found anything they’d call indigo? If so, I’d love to see it! Post a link in the comments and I’ll find time to come look. I promise on that one. I LOVE indigo!

Next, Purple, violet, whatever you want to call it! And I’m still on the lookout for indigo.

This week, it’s blue. Which is almost unfair, since so much in my world is blue. When the EO and I got together, we both a bit surprised to find that we also shared a love of blue and silver.

So anyway. Blue things. I wanted to include a photo of the Carolina sky, but the day I went to take the photo the clouds rolled in, and it looked like Seattle!!!

Next week… Indigo… blue or not?

Then I moved out here.  In the spring. Which supposedly starts in February when the first crocuses and daffodils bloom. And peonies. Well, you saw what happened to my peonies this year.  The daffodils met a similar fate, although they are tired and still pushing along.

So. Green. Every shade imaginable.  On my way home from work today I passed a grove where I swear there are at least 30 different shades of green in a 10 by 10 foot patch. Many of the yellow-greens that for a long time I believed lived only in my Crayola box, and not in nature.

And just because I intended these to go in the yellow post and was thwarted by snow from taking them…

So on to the pretties! As usual, you can click to make bigger.

So. Three photos.  All of bananas. Well, one banana.  Tonight it’s supposed to snow. So there may be photos of daffodils in snow later, like the peonies.

The entire banana. Quite a pretty shade of yellow. Delicious, too.

The END of the banana is just plain interesting. It LOOKS like it’s been burnt where it’s cut off the tree.

I LOVE the details when you look at it up close.

And this weekend there were lovely yellow costumes on a couple of the dancers. I’ll provide links when my favorite photographer puts her photos up.

Next week… green!

There are a lot of construction flags. I was trying to avoid actually taking pictures of oranges or carrots. I didn’t manage it.  But here we go:

The orange sweatshirt on the construction guy with all the orange traffic cones in his truck:

First I felt the need to cheat and use the doodle I did on an orange scratch pad at work:

I resorted to photographing the ads:

I found the orange lid of the glue at the office:

Then I noticed that the book I’m knitting from has a great deal of orange in it:

And I finally resorted to food: oranges, and then noticed the baker’s chocolate in the baking cupboard of things I can no longer eat:

And I took a close up of the bag for the oranges because as well as being a beautiful deep orange, the texture was just so cool!

So. Did YOU find anything neat and orange this week? Trackback or post a comment so I can see, too!

Edited to add: Next week… Yellow!

And it is, still Valentine’s day, if not for much longer where I am. I meant to get this out earlier, but the day kind of got out of hand…

Anyway. Here are some of my red images. I actually found more than I expected to, and none of them are roses or valentines! I think Orange may be harder next week…

This is the apple I had for a snack last Wednesday, my red editing pen at work, and the “blood” all over the technical document I’m editing. I wrote it, so the author won’t feel TOO bad that the editor is making all those corrections, LOL!

The berries outside of the drive-thru where I bought my salad…

The dressing had a red packet, too! But I’ll leave them to your imagination.

We had Valentine’s Day dinner at a red restaurant. This is the Evil Overlord… at least as much as anyone will ever see of him… he prefers to live in the shadows. (REAL dinner was sushi last night. My husband really is a romantic at heart.)

Even the cups are red:

So that’s my red week. Leave a comment or a trackback to show me yours!

Next week… Orange!

This does not always work. While I have used more yellows and oranges over the years, blue, green and purple still overwhelms them in my stash and work. And always will, I suspect. Sometimes I don’t even notice the other colors around me. Even the acrylic painting I started last week turns out to have a predominance of blue and green!

Do you wear this kind of color blinders, too?

Over the next seven weeks I’ve decided to challenge myself to find the colors around me. One week, one color, until I’ve worked through the whole rainbow. This week I’m starting with red. I’m going to try to take photos of what I find in my life in these colors as I go and post them here on Saturday morning.

Want to play with me? Post photos to your blog or flickr account and then post the link in the comments when I post my photos on Saturdays.

This will be a short week, since I’m just starting, but since this Saturday is Valentine’s day, RED should be easy enough to find around us.

Come explore our colorful world with me!