Entries Tagged as: color
Be a Color Detective
April 22nd, 2009, Comments (14)
Late last week, I was taking a walk and started to notice bits of color on the ground. Scraps of plastic, a tag, a bit of paper, a ribbon, a child's barrette, and the yellow balloon pictured above. Suddenly, my walk transformed from something ordinary into a magical color detective adventure!
I was listening to an audio book on my iPhone which also has a camera, which I used to snap pictures of color for the rest of my walk. The colorful arrows spray painted on the sidewalk were giving me clues about which way to go next.
Texture and color began to pop for me. The bright yellow stripe against the the colors and textures of street and brick were so juicy! How often do you stop and notice the texture and color combos on your street? Just having a camera will open your eyes to all sorts of everyday beauty.
Ooo, rust, how gorgeous are you? Especially against that dusty blue paint. Yum. Little snapshots like this could inspire a color palette for a future piece of art or they could be transformed into a painting, piece of jewelry, or color scheme for an outfit.
Shadows are fantastic too. Now that Spring has arrived (this works in all seasons, but is more fun for me when the weather is warmer), get outside with your camera and focus on capturing shadows on colorful backgrounds. Plants make great shapes, but you can also get great shadows from your own body against a background of grass, reflected in water, or against a colorful building.
Taking a color detective walk was so much fun and I found that by the time I got home I was in a fabulous mood. Give it at try and let me know how it goes for you!
Is the Creative Every Day Challenge theme of color making you notice color more than usual? I know it is for me!
Art Picnic Class is this Saturday!
April 21st, 2009, Comments (0)
Are you looking to experience a gremlin-quieting, art-making, creative-block-busting good time?
Yes, you say? Well, then I'd like to invite you to join me on an Art Picnic adventure, this Saturday, April 25th from 1 - 3 pm E.S.T. for only $25! (Find out what time that is in your area here.)
On an Art Picnic you will:
* Get grounded and connect with your intuition.
* Let go and get playful with your art.
* Get creative support from me to help you unblock and create freely.
* Have a blast creating your own, unique Art Picnic experience!
* Leave with all the tools you need to continue creating your own Art Picnics.
* Take excellent care of yourself by scheduling in some all-important creativity time.
I started Art Picnics out of a need to get unstuck creatively in a fun, no-pressure way. I was frozen in the fear of not being good enough and all the inner critic voices were keeping me from enjoying my creativity.
With a few simple tools, which I'll share with you in this class, I learned how to move beyond my fears and create from a place of joy, freedom, and authenticity.
The class takes place on the phone, so you can attend from wherever you are! During the first half hour, we will meet, discuss the tools you need to get started, and do a grounding exercise. We will then get off the phone and have our individual art picnic experiences. I will be playing and creating too, but I will also stay on the bridge line, so if you get stuck, you can call in and I will help you through it. In the final half hour, we will meet to discuss what we created, share what came up for us, and learn some tools to keep our creative energy flowing.
You do not need to consider yourself an artist to join in, everyone is welcome. You don't need loads of art supplies either. I enjoyed my first art picnic with just a blanket to sit on, some paper, magazines, and a glue stick. Simply bring whatever art, craft, or journaling supplies you have available and be prepared to have fun!
*As a special bonus, if you sign up for your Saturday's Art Picnic, I will send you a free mp3 recording of a grounding exercise I use that will help you get connected with your intuition before you start creating!
I am so excited to share this process with you, so sign up here and join me on Saturday for some Art Picnic fun!! Sign up by clicking the Add to cart button below:
Drinking up Color Online and Offline
April 15th, 2009, Comments (14)
Yum. Something about color is so delicious to me right now. I'm just drinking it up. Between the Intuitive Painting class I'm taking, the fact that Spring is finally happening here in New England, and this month's theme for the Creative Every Day Challenge, I'm all about color.
One of Sukanto Debnath's photos of Holi, Festival of Color
If you're in need of a shot of color, get yourself over to the Colour Lovers blog. They have fabulous articles with stunning pictures sure to inpire you. I'm loving this one about Holi, the Hindu Festival of Color that happens in March, and this one about the colorful art of Thangkas.
Speaking of Thangkas, I had the pleasure of meeting Leslie Rinchen-Wongmo at a Christine Kane retreat last month and she makes absolutely amazing pieces of textile art working in a Tibetan tradion. Her fabric thangkas are sacred Buddhist images created in layered, hand-stitched silk. Wow, beautiful stuff. Leslie has a blog and she's on Twitter too!
Do you ever notice the colors that are prevalent in the places you travel to? Something about traveling to a new place makes things like color really pop for me. Even if we're unable to travel at this time, we are so lucky to be able to view colors from all over the world online. This site explores color all around the world and wow, it is so inspirational. Or you could just go get lost in Flickr, searching for random words.
What colors are you drawn to as you look around online and offline? Make notes in a sketchbook and later use oil pastels, colored pencils, collage, paint, or crayons to play with your chosen colors.
Or try this: Flip through magazines and without thinking tear out any color that catches your eye. Don't focus on the objects, just the colors, textures, and patterns. Spend at least 5 minutes tearing, then put all your images out in front of you, and make mini color palettes. You can use a glue stick to glue these color palettes into your journal or onto 5"x7" cards (old postcards work great for this). This can be a great jumping off point for some artwork (either painting over the magazine images or recreating your color palette in another media.)
Go soak up the color. I can't wait to see what you create!
Color Inspired by Poetry
April 14th, 2009, Comments (19)
intuitive art detail
Last night I attended the second in a series of Intuitive Painting classes I'm taking (taught by the super sweet, Adria Arch.) We first focused on a series of small (5"x7") collages we'd made of color torn from magazines. Last week, one of the assignments was to paint in colors I normally avoid (for me those were pinks, yellows, oranges) and I used that painting for my Full Pink Moon dreamboard. Well, oddly enough, the color collage I liked best was full of rich pinks and oranges! Go figure. Try it out for yourself. Paint with colors you normally dislike or avoid and see what happens. It might just change your mind about them!
In last night's class we focused on working a few smaller pieces at the same time, using a poem we'd selected as our inspiration. We were asked not to get too literal with the poem (in other words we weren't going to illustrate it), but to let our general feeling about the poem guide us in our color choices and paint strokes.
I, along with a few other students in class chose a piece from Mary Oliver. I picked her poem Wild Geese and although I wasn't thinking about it at the time, I have a feeling my choice was guided by the mother goose I saw on a walk on Friday afternoon. I happened to peek over a bridge to look at the waterfall there and spotted her there on a cement barrier. At first I thought she was just sleeping, but then when I saw the sticks and fuzz surrounding her, I suspeced it must be a nest. I watched her for awhile and she noticed me watching. At one point she stood up and revealed 5 or 6 eggs. I snapped a picture of her with my iphone. Not the best picture in the world as I couldn't zoom in on her, but I love the tree and sky reflections it captured.
I thought it was so sweet, but then I started to worry about the baby geese (goslings). They're so close to this waterfall. Do you think they'll be able to swim away from it when they're old enough to swim? I was up last night worrying about the goslings and couldn't sleep, so eventually I just imagined them easily swimming into the river and that seemed to help. I'm going to have to trust that the Momma goose knew what she was doing nesting there.
Anyways, the Mary Oliver poem is lovely and I thought I'd share it with you in case it inspires some artwork for you! Poetry is so evocative. Try using a favorite piece of literature and imagine what colors it brings to mind for you. Use that as the start for your next piece of art.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
I ended up using different parts of the poem to inspire the three different pieces I was working on. Each piece below was inspired by the lines above it:
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes
They're all quite different! None of them feel complete really, but it was fun to play with color and layering and different ways of approaching a painting inspired by poetry.
I've got much to do and much more to share with you, but for now, do check out my interview at Pecannoot!! And a huge thank you to Jess for inviting me to be the first ever interviewee on Pecannoot! What a treat!
Painting a Full Pink Moon Dreamboard
April 9th, 2009, Comments (27)
I am quite fond of the moon and it turns up quite a bit in my art. When I heard that this full moon is called the Full Pink Moon, I thought how perfect that I'd just painted a big pink painting in my Intuitve Painting class on Monday!
The lovely Jamie Ridler leads a full moon dreamboard challenge on her blog and I wanted to participate in this one. All the dreamboards (or vision boards) I've created in the past have been with magazine images, but I thought it might be fun to paint a dreamboard using the big pink painting I'd created as the base. First, I drew a little sketch intuitively, focusing on what I wanted to see bloom in my life. I drew a girl soaring, a girl peacefully sitting in a flower, and a house. At the bottom I wrote blossom and bloom with two more lotus-like flowers. And then I brought that sketch to the big pink painting (it's 18"x24") and used it as the background for the scene that unfurled. The clouds sort of came as I went along. I can't tell if the soaring girl is hanging on the clouds or pushing them up into the air. I may work on this further, but I wanted to get it up tonight.
detail
What is it that you are wanting to blossom and bloom in your life? Could you use a colorful painting as the base for a dreamboard?
Intuitive Art and Committing to your Creativity
April 7th, 2009, Comments (26)
Last night I attended the first of a series of Intuitive Painting classes I signed up for. Before the class started, I received an email from the teacher saying that the first class was going to be all about color. I laughed at the synchronicity of it, considering this month's theme for the Creative Every Day Challenge is color!
The first class was a feast for the senses. Each student was given a packet with a scent in it and then we were asked to create a color based on that scent. Mine was a yummy spice and the color I created was a warm reddish-brown. We all shared our colors and then used our color, along with the color of a classmate, to simply play with paint. I let my paint drip and run at first. We painted very quickly, so each of these pieces could be developed with further (all except the one directly below are 18"x24") or used as the beginning of a painting later on. The idea in moving quickly is to kick out the inner-judge and get painting, to try new things, to experiment. The first piece (below), created something that looked a bit like a face.
In the next piece, we used the first two colors, plus one more. The result of that one is the first image in this post. It was fun to play, to splatter, spray, scrape, and smoosh paint and just see what happens. In the next piece, we added one more color, using something a little unusual for us. I don't use a lot of yellow, I tried adding that to the piece below.
We quickly moved on to the next, where the teacher encouraged us to paint with colors that we have a strong feeling for (like or dislike). I'm not a big fan of pink (I paint with it pretty rarely, so I just went nuts with the pink paint and added some yellow too.) As you can see, Emma especially liked that one.
It was a fun class and I'm looking forward to doing some more playing next week!
One thing that's great about signing up for a class like this, is that it gives you a set time each week, when rain or shine, you're going to honor your commitment to create. And yes, signing up and paying for it is helpful in getting me to actually show up at the specified time and place. How do you make commitments to your creativity? Here are some of the things I do:
*I participate in challenges (like the Creative Every Day Challenge) to help keep me focused.
*I get support (like my wonderful coach, Kathy who just started her own blog!).
*I take classes, online and in-person.
*I show up to create even when I'm not feeling inspired.
*I schedule time for creative projects I want to see fulfilled (literally picking days and times and putting them in my calendar!)
*I take time off to rest and re-fill the well. (We all have creative cycles.)
*I ask for help when I need it. (This one can be hard for me, but I'm working on it.)
*I find inspiration everywhere.
*I use a theme word for the year (Leap!) and keep it posted in front of my desk to remind me.
How do you commit to your creativity?
p.s. One of the reasons I started offering Art Picnic teleclasses was because I know that having a set time on your calendar to focus on creating is incredibly helpful in maintaining a creative practice. Want to make a date with your creativity? Join us on the 25th for the next Art Picnic workshop!
Colorful Poems
April 3rd, 2009, Comments (17)
Our way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
~Rumi
April is National Poetry month. I love the idea of playing with the Creative Every Day Challenge's theme of color and poetry. How could you mesh the two?
You could:
*Write about yourself as a color, as in "I am blue. I am soft, ethereal, just-woken."
*Write about how a color feels, how it smells, and tastes.
*Paint a wash of your favorite color in a journal and write the lines of your favorite poems over it.
*Play with writing a poem in color, mixing the words with what colors you imagine them to be.
*Turn your head to the right, what's the first color you see? Right a poem about it.
*Use a colorful photograph as the jumping off point for a piece of poetry.
*What is your least favorite color? What is it about that color that you dislike? Write free-form style about it.
*Read a favorite poem. Does it seem to reflect a certain color for you?
*What childhood memories does the color red bring up for you? Let that be a starting point. Red makes me think of my sister's stained t-shirts, popsicles in summer that turned our tongues red, the choke berries in the woods that made me wonder if they really did make a person choke, the red jumpsuit I was wearing the day I got my first period.
Color can hold so many associations, so many memories. Where do those color memories take you?
For more poetry goodness, check out:
*Resources for writing poetry with kids
Red bird came all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else could.
~Mary Oliver
And I couldn't resist sharing...more Mary Oliver below...
(more...)What Do Your Color Choices Say?
April 2nd, 2009, Comments (7)
Spring is such a fantastic time to focus on delicious color! I hope you'll have fun playing with the Creative Every Day Challenge's totally optional theme of color this month!
mermaids
I took the first bit of playful color I painted for the theme's announcement and created this piece out of it. I was just playing with color when I started it, but as I do with so much of my art, I started to see things in it, in this case, a pair of mermaids. And I see something else in it, something maybe I'll play with in another piece. Do you see the bird? Here's it's face:
mermaids detail
What colors are you drawn to right now? Let your self play with them. If you're playing with paint, squirt the colors right on the canvas, move them around, let your intuition guide you in the strokes you use, the colors you choose, the places you stop and start.
Let the paint dry and then step back and see if you're seeing anything there. Are you seeing a figure? A face? An animal? A tree? Start to emphasize the image you see. Bring some areas forward and let others fade into the background. Is there a story developing?
What's the feeling your color choices are evoking? Does it express something that you are feeling in your everyday life? What are your color choices trying to tell you?
I'd love to hear about what colors you're feeling especially drawn to right now!
p.s. The free Dream Call with Lianne Raymond is happening tonight! Sign up here if you'd like to join in!
CED April Theme: Color
March 25th, 2009, Comments (34)
ced color
The *totally optional* theme for the Creative Every Day Challenge in April will be Color!
How can you use this theme in your creations? Well, you could use the previous themes to help you brainstorm by getting playful and writing all the ways you could intepret the theme. Or perhaps you will dream something up?
If you need some suggestions, I will be posting about the theme throughout the month. Here are a few ideas to get you started. You could:
- *Capture the color around you in photographs.
- *Limit the color schemes in an art piece.
- *Try using a color you don't usually use.
- *Add a splash of color to your wardrobe.
- *Bring color into your space with flowers or artwork.
- *Learn about the psychology of color.
How to use the CED themes:
If you're feeling creatively stuck or blocked at any point during the month, use the theme as a source of inspiration to get you moving.
Using the theme is entirely optional for CED participants. Use it if it inspires you, ignore it if it doesn't. I'll be sharing posts throughout the month around the theme (among other things) to get you thinking about how to incorporate it into your life. I'd love to hear how you use the theme in your creative world.
Feel free to focus on the theme in your creative activities for the entire month or as much as you'd like.
And have fun with it!
“I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”
~Joan Miro
Spanish Surrealist Painter and Sculptor, 1893-1983
p.s. I jumped into playing with the theme a bit early in the painting above. I loved playing around with bold, rich colors in an abstract way. This is only a snippit of it, but I think I see a mermaid in it (can't help myself!), so perhaps I'll bring her out later.
