Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Color Journal

I recently purchase a book about exploring color by Julia Caprara. The book has a number of exercises to help you learn to work with color. One of them is making a color journal. I have to confess though that I find doing journal exercises to be a bit contrived, but I wanted to give it a try anyways. So the best thing to do though in this situation, is to do the exercises in a way that suit you.

I chose red to begin with. It's my favorite. I decided to save myself the step of carrying my camera around everywhere looking for red, and instead picked a few photos from my hard drive. Mostly they ended up being fruits (I like to take photos of them while they are on the vine!!) But there was one butterfly and a lamp with a red glass. I did a couple little drawings with colored pencils to go with two of the photos.

I haven't done much more yet, but the other photos are shown below. I have taped them on some pages in the book.

Lots of red! I could probably find even more photos, but I just decided to stop there. I am not done with the red though! I wanted to try doing something with some paints and do something with some bit of embroidery. I'm not sure how far I will go with the color journal idea. If I feel like I am learning something from it, then I will go on, but there is much else to do too that teaches one about color!

It's vacation season here. I keep on stitching and drawing and taking photos, but computer time is limited!!! Summer is altogether too short! I be checking in soon again though. Until then keep on stitching and creating art!


3 comments:

Rachel said...

I, too, find these sorts of exercises somewhat contrived, but they do help you to think and look with more attention.

Anonymous said...

Although I'd read this post in my reader earlier this week, I just had to stop by the blog tonight...I'm looking at all the past posts of your work to try to figure out what stitch to use on a maple leaf sampler. It really is a sampler, just a drawn design of maple leaves and acorns with a bit of swirl connecting them. I'm playing around with different fill stitches and having a bit of trouble with what to use on those maple leaves. They have the points instead of a nice oval or round shape. Anyway, I'm so glad I can go back and look at what you've done and read your thought process as you chose stitches. Thank you, Emily!

Chrissie

Starr White said...

Your color journal looks great, Emily. I love your sketches, they're great! I really like the photos you selected to represent your favorite color - especially the mushroom! ;)