Colour Theory

 Colour; Over time we form a personal palette; from memory, experience, successes?

Acknowledge you make colour choices - some make us feel uncomfortable, it is important to be honest with yourself about colour; if I make the wrong choice I feel it and I can't enjoy the work I have made or connect with it effectively. This is most often the reason I paint over a piece. It even happened with the quilt project, I tried to use all the coloured fabrics in a noisy piece and I disliked looking at it. Once I pared it back, or figured out how to use all the colours together my work felt like my own.

How do I choose colour? I have a tendency to pinks/peach/orange. I use layers of thin acrylic but also whited out opaques. I find opacity really interesting.

I also choose to work with donated material, often emulsions, this can be very opaque, others surprisingly transparent, and I find this tension between matte and gloss opaque and transparent curious.

TASK: make our own pigments and apply to different binders. 

I want to keep this simple, I could go off on a rambling exploration but I can't see the concept behind this so I will use same rules apply: I plan to make this work an exploration of Lockdown 2.0 - mud from the garden where Finn has his 'Sugar factory', dirt from under the floor where my husband is exploring, Tea that I do drink, veg in the fridge, and a limited (to begin with perhaps?) set of binders. I just received some calico in the post for a future quilt project, the patchwork of tests could make a very nice diary of Lockdown 2.0 in quilt form. The binders used to begin with will be PVA and white acrylic. Both will adhere to fabric well (since I am making a pigmented paint rather than a dye) And will test the transparent and the opaque.

I also like the juxtaposition of 'natural' pigment and 'processed' binder.

 I Read in the book ‘botanical colour at your fingertips’ that the more a plant gives up its colour the less the colour will stay, my beetroot paint is already turning brown after 2days. Amazing! This could be an interesting premise, if you were to paint with beet ink/paint (and then photograph it daily?), it would change and you would only have a memory of the original pink image. My question is is how long does this take and also if it stays brown or completely disappears. Have the different mediums had an effect on the stay fastness of colour from the beets.

28/11/20

I was thinking about linking memories. Not specific memories, maybe even memories we create. I bought some taffeta a few weeks ago because the seller said they had had it since the 80s, they couldn’t remember what it was used for but they think perhaps a bridesmaids dress. I was fairly obsessed with bridesmaids dresses as a youngster, my friend had a collection of them due to a large extended family and I thought they were so wonderful. At the time (early 90s) the dresses were very Princess Di inspired, lots of frills and bows, and ruching, very princess. So these are the kinds of memories this fabric gives me. Plastered with dirt from under the floor (this is building materials, old plaster and wallpaper from the last 100 years), it is stark contrast to the pink shiny taffeta, but nonetheless full of memory or potential memory.