Peruse, Palette, Ponder: Creating An Artist’s Palette

This is Deb, pondering a lot lately. I sometimes start my day scanning social media, not a bad thing, especially when it revolves around one’s own artistic palette. My recent perusing evolved into a theme. First I opened my Adobe Create magazine and read an article about illustrator Sarah Hasenmaile.

Inspiration

Susan limits herself to a palette of red, pink and blue—with an occasional yellow thrown in. Then I saw Lisa Walton’s photo of her suitcase with Leah Higgins’ book Breakdown your Palette. With a title like that, of course I had to google Leah Higgins. (Could you have imagined 20 years ago that an accepted synonym for “to look up” would be a word like google? It is a transitive verb according to Merriam Webster. But I digress.)

 

Leah teaches printing courses and her prompt to “develop colour families [palettes] from your own sources of inspiration and experiment with adding contrasting colour” almost makes me want to start printing on fabric the “old fashioned” way. So that brings me to my current dilemma.

Dilemma

I’m part of the group Cloth in Common—a group of international fiber artists who create artwork based on a new prompt every two months. The first prompt was “Identity,” and I knew I had to make a self-portrait.

 

For this round the prompt is “Reflection.” Well, I did a lot of reflecting for my self-portrait. So I could just submit the same quilt. Alas, this is not college where I could tweak one paper to use for another class. The object is to create something new. When I joined the group, I thought I would like to have something visual to tie my 12 quilts together. One idea is a color palette. But I am NOT going to work with the main palette from my self-portrait. Using the bright colors from the explosion might be a possibility. I guess I’ll have to ponder this some more. Any suggestions? I’ll be pondering this more as we teach the color lessons in our upcoming Photoshop Elements classes. Click here if you want to join us.