Reflections on Appreciation

(Picture: Second experiment: Bamboo forest)

 I took time over the last month to appreciate the curious student within.

I've shared about taking Jean's Dreaming in Color class and I bought a couple color wheel tools to help with one of the assignments in her book, Intuitive Design and Color. Pulling all of that together brought me to a couple long conversations with my daughter - who is an artist and designer. Finding a whole corner of the art world that I hadn't wandered through in a long time led me to experiment and just have fun. Yes, I'm talking about colors and back to the high school classes where we talked about primary, secondary, contrasting colors. It's been energizing to pull all that back into the conscious part of my design process.

I started with a photograph and printed it out in black and white because I wanted to get a better feel for the values and hues. I then focused on a small cropped section of the photo, using tracing paper to capture the main lines and shade values. One of the things my daughter and Jean both said is that often art is about representing what you are seeing - its there to evoke a feeling (hopefully the feelings that made you take the picture in the first place. Tricky.

This was the original crop

Here's the tracing...

Below is my first experiment with split complimentary colors - (Analogous colors for yellow - green and the complimentary color which is purple). I wasn't quite getting what I wanted but I liked the colors and the process. See the top of this post for the second sample I made that I did like. It evoked much more of what I saw in that bamboo forest on the land of Fushimi-Inari shrine in Kyoto, Japan.

I appreciated all sorts of different things about working through this exercise. First of all, I've reconfirmed for myself that I learn best with hands-on, tactile learning. Concrete experiential learning style, to be exact. I needed to see for myself how the yellow central bamboo pops out too much against the dark green. Contrast.  I learned that the value added with the purple was pleasing to my eye. I learned that the method that Jean Wells works with in much of her art - hand cut strips - helped create movement. I learned about piecing fabric in a wonderful new way that doesn't use fusing. I also pushed myself to go abstract - to not worry about perfect.  I had a great time - and will use some new wisdom with the next experiment. I'll think more about focal point and building a better picture ahead of time for the colors and contrast.

All in all, a very satisfying foray into inspiration, learning, and a small completed project that just might get some embroidered bamboo leaves for added definition.