Splashing it up

"Every artist dips [her] brush into [her] own soul, and paints [her] own nature into her pictures."  - Henry Ward Beecher

Happy Friday!  We talked on Monday about a couple ways to approach using color, and began collecting a handful of colorful objects to have on hand.  Then Wednesday we began stretching our creative phalanges by mark making and doodling.  Let's get to playing with them all together, shall we?

Week 4 Home[play]: Color Play

Have your sketchbooks, your colorful objects, and your personal selection of color-making tools at the ready!   You might use colored pencils, watercolors, acrylic paint, markers, pastels, cut out bits of color from various paper sources, or a grand combination of them all.

We will be splashing through our sketchbooks, doodling in chroma, recording color, adding saturated thoughts to our pages past and future.  I like to begin by starting with a single colorful object and making loose references and abstract shapes (puddles of color, thick stripes, loose shapes that may or may not reference the object at hand).  I might think of creating an atmospheric haze of color, a geometric pattern in which different shapes get to become different hues, or even loosely drawn objects filled in with their respective colors.  Really we're just trying to get some of that fabulous chroma in our sketchbooks, a.k.a. reference tool boxes, a.k.a. visual vocabulary.   

Take a peek through your sketchbook and begin adding in bits of color: You might want to add onto your intentional doodling pages, or perhaps add color to your "found and collected object" pages, you might look back through your exploration pages and add swatches of color that help bring a new dimension to your notes.  Similarly to how we played with intentional doodling, this is a great way to keep your hand loose and listen for any cues your intention gives.  You may even put down a block of color on a new page and allow yourself to free associate with what thoughts, ideas, places, objects that color brings up in you.

Anytime you feel yourself becoming stuck, or getting too tight, try switching up colors OR even switching up mediums.  If you've been working in color pencil, and find yourself feeling fussy, try cutting out a big shape from a magazine or catalogue, or put some paint right on your fingertips and smooth it across the page.  And if your intuition directs you to the canvas, the rolled hide of leather and antiques, your bundles of yarn or the tiny pots of enamel powder, FOLLOW IT!  When we do this type of work, we're opening the doors for our intuition to come through, for our inner child to play, and our muse to speak out loud!  

Have fun, get a little messy, splash it up, and if you're so inclined, show us what you're playing with in the FaceBook group! 

In love of all things free and colorful,

- K