Creating a Colour Collection

The inspiration for many historical textiles was to give the wearer protection.
Red was thought to be a powerful colour. When it was used around the edges of garments in the form of tassels and beads, it was thought to ward of the evil eye! Vivien Westwood used tampons covered in silk in place of tassels on her garments -I’m sure they would ward of an evil eye!

Colour colection
The painter Bonnard stuck shiny sweet wrappers on his studio wall to inspire him while he was working with colour and light.
Christian Lacroix may find inspiration for a dress design from an old painting, colours from a vague memory of fabrics seen in childhood and use motifs from Matisse and Picasso. So you see the most famous designers work with inspirations already created in some form.

I would like to show you a way to design and create your own work of art. What you are going to do is take a selection of favourite images and break them down into the separate parts outlined above. When you reassemble them you will have your own unique design, which will look absolutely nothing like of the images that you started with!

What is inspiration? Many philosophers and biologists have searched the human brain to find the source of inspiration. So far they have failed to unravel the mystery. Many flashes of inspiration come when the person is doing something else like gardening or walking the dog. Others spend hours in detailed thought carefully working on an idea.

Few people can generate ideas to order. This is why most of us have to trick our brains into releasing its ideas. Relaxing , going for a walk, day dreaming or doodling are just some of the many techniques that people use. Everyone has their own special way, everyone is capable of being creative.

There are many enjoyable ways to gain inspiration. Visit an exhibition of an artist whose work you particularly like. You can find good examples of complex colour collections. I visited the Bonnard exhibition in London and really enjoyed his colour. I also visited the Braque exhibition. When I walked in I wondered how I was going to enjoy it. His paintings are not beautiful! But I ended up being fascinated by the dissconcerting way he used line. He takes the lines of a room or a table and draws them at odd angles creating a very strange effect. Your mind wants to see a room but can’t. It reminded me that I am free to be quite daring when creating a composition with the colours or the motifs on my quilts!

Its just the feeling of excitement you need, seeing wonderful colours or patterns, your ideas will start to flow - all by themselves! When you see a beautiful flower in the garden, maybe a purple pansy. What it is that you like. The velvet texture? The softly blending colours so unique to flowers and hand dyed silk? The frilly edges of the petals? You may be inspired to make a velvet scarf, hand dyed in similar colours, with an edge scalloped in the shapes of the petals. And it won’t look much like a pansy! But it will have been your inspiration.
As ideas begin to flow you have to act quickly and grab the little creatures before you forget them. This is why artists always have a sketch / note book with them. After trying to write down ideas on bus tickets,( very tricky) I now go out of the house armed with pen and paper. It doesn’t matter if you can’t draw, just describe your ideas in words and use simple diagrams.

If you can't get to art it can come to you. There are many books and magazines that use art directors and photographers that are at the top of their profession. Make use of their experience and skill. Look for colour collections, texture and composition in their work. We will look further into how you can make practical use of these in another issue, at this time you are simply aiming to enjoy and be inspired. Buy a glossy homes or fashion magazine, they use top photographers and art directors for their shots.You can find wonderful colour arrangements, fascinating textures and interesting examples of composition, especially in fashion shots where they have only the body to work with, Vivien Westwood ads spring to mind!

The important thing to realise is that you need the inspiration! You truly cannot go forward without it unless you mearly wish to copy somebody elses work from start to finish.
We will look next into how to record and make practical use of the colours from your sources of inspiration.

A COLOUR COLLECTION – The Artists Pallette

When you design your work of art you will need to have a consise idea of the colours and the proportion of colours that you would like to use.
I am going to suggest a way of sucssesfully gathering this collection. This will become your artists pallette.

You will need:
Paper – any sort of plain white or cream.
Colouring materials – pencils, pastels, water colours, crayons.
I recommend a box of pastels, you don’t need brushes and you can mix the colours easily and can therefore create a good range of interesting colours.

Silk

If you have a post card or picture from a magazine with a collection of colours that you think work well together, start by writing in words the colours that you see. Try to use words that are descriptive for you, so that you will remember what you are talking about! I know exactly what I mean by wistful blue and old rose white. Make a list according to the proportions of colour you see in your picture. It may look something like this:

1 Delphinium blue - lots
2 Lime green - lots
3 Soft violet – quite a lot
4 Deep greeny blue - small amount
5 Emily Grey buff yellow (rose in my garden) - tiny amount

If you chose to visit an art gallery to gather the inspiration for your collection, you may like to copy the colours from a selected painting using a box of pastels. They are fairly cheap to buy and reproduce colours found in paintings well, being easy to blend and mix. Or if you are feeling shy use the method above.

Remember to include colours that your not so fond of if they are in the picture. You may not be attracted to them on their own but they may be vital to setting of the whole collection. Lime green or bright pink is often found in impressionist / expressionist paintings and really brings the many other colours to life! Also note the near blacks and whites, a little of these colours can ground a collection especially if there is a wide range of strong colour being used.

The next trick is to cover a sheet of paper with your chosen colour collection. Again pastels work well as do water colour paints or acrylics ( acrylics are very thick & heavy be warned ) Start with the colour in the largest proportions. Make selection of different scribble marks. Use each colour in similar quantities as the picture you are working from, using your written details i.e. lots quite a lot and a little. Don’t let your husband see this he will say something terribly accurate about such terms as a lot and a little meaning nothing out of context. Ignore him and carry on scribbling!

Then take the next highest proportion colour. Repeat until you have applied the colour seen in the smallest proportions.
Do Not worry if the colours don’t look any thing like the original picture. Do worry if you don’t like them! If you don’t like the collection you have created on the paper try using a different medium, you may prefer the colours created with pastels rather than crayon or visa versa.

You should now have your personal colour collection, and you will be familiar with working with the proportions. Using fabric paints and fabric crayons you can apply the colours to plain white/cream fabric. Cotton, silk, and cotton velvet are all suitable as they are natural fabrics and will therefore take the dye well. The addition of gold gutta or permanent drawing ink adds a sparkle for those of you that have magpie instincts!

Part two will follow shortly.

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