Tumbling down

I think I mentioned before that I've been playing around with Tumblr, and actually I've been using it lately at least as much I've been using Twitter, or probably more. I enjoy Twitter, but Tumblr is a lot more versatile - and unlike Blogger it can figure out what size to make an embedded YouTube video without me having to figure it out for myself! My Tumblr account is called Delicious Color, rather than Delicious Beads. I'm not intending to stop updating here - as a matter of fact I may well do Nablopomo in November, like I did last year, and post daily - but things like random pictures and video and such are probably going on Tumblr. It's just easier.

I realized something in the last year or so, and it's the reason for the shift of name - and that's that my love of color runs a lot deeper than my love of any particular craft. I used to say I liked quilting because it was like coloring, except with fabric instead of crayons, and I think I like beading and, lately, painting things, for exactly the same reason. It's all about the color. I'm not intending to change the name of this journal any time soon, though. (I did register Delicious Color on Blogspot and Etsy as well as Tumblr, just the same, though, just in case I decide in the future I want to!)

Here's another book I was leafing through in the bookstore the other day. (Amazon links probably will stay here, for the most part, partly because that's something that Blogger does make easy!)

Notes to myself

On-the-fly color mixing (with CH Studio paints):
Sky Blue + Purple Palette = a really lovely cornflower-ish color
Smidge of Blue + Dab of Yellow + Pastel Yellow = a nice forest green
(I discovered the latter because I tried the first two  - that is, Smidge of Blue and Dab of Yellow, which is a darker golden-yellow - and thought the resulting color was too dark. So I thought "Add more yellow!" and when I reached for the yellow I picked up the pastel yellow instead of the darker one. But I like the color I came out with a lot, so I wanted to remember what it was that I did.)

I just tried Claudine's "glazed paper resist" and it came out absolutely gorgeous. This uses Bazzill glazed cardstock painted very very lightly with a sponge (I used these). The glazed portions act as a resist. I'll post a picture when I have one.

I do have one picture to share - I'm two weeks behind on the class projects which means I'm just now working on the grid project. Here's what I had as of yesterday:

These are 2" squares, plus a 2" strip on the left that was where I was experimenting. The blue leaves are Bazzill embossed paper, done in a similar way to the glazed cardstock technique, with a sponge. The color is Smidge of Blue (which is very dark in the bottle but lightens up nicely, as you can see). I would really like to have been able to get the color to go on a little more evenly, but on the other hand I think the mottled blue looks pretty cool, too. I imagine getting it more even is partly a matter of practice.

The other three squares, going clockwise, are stencilled, embossed with amethyst PearlLustre and Perfect Pearls, and photo-tinted. The dark green on the stencilled one is the mixed color I was describing above, and the lighter green is Claudine's Landscape Green. I have never really stencilled anything in my life so I thought this came out really well for a first try!

Paints and color schemes

When I posted about the circles and rub-ons thing I made, I meant to write down exactly how I mixed these colors, because I knew I would forget, and I wanted to write it down for my own reference. And of course I did not actually do that, and now I want to know.

We are now on week 8 of 12 in Claudine's class, which is starting to sound like we're getting toward the end, although really there's quite a lot to go, still. This week's assignment is another thing on an 8x8" canvas, and I'm wavering between doing an entirely different color scheme, or making it match the first one. Or I guess since I want it to go in my living room, which is basically dark green, I could come up with a somewhat different color scheme that also matches the green. So similar without being all matchy with the first one.

(If you listen to me when I'm making quilts, in particular, you will find that "matchy" is my idea of a bad word. I'm a scrap quilter to the core, I am bored when people just take fabrics from one line of quilt fabrics and make a quilt out of them. Or when they are too too careful about matching things exactly. I find that things tend to look better when they don't quite match perfectly. I'll put the picture of my "monochromatic" all-green quilt at the bottom so you can see what I mean about not matching too carefully.)

Now one thing I was intending to say was that I just love Claudine's paints. If they have a bad side, it's that they're a little on the expensive side compared to craft paints. And as I understand it, the reason for that is that they're not really craft paint, they're art paints (acrylics) adapted a little for a craft market. They're very high-quality paints, in other words, which is why they're more expensive. And I've been using craft paints a good bit this year so I can see the difference immediately. Claudine's paints have a much nicer texture to them - they seem smoother, and boy oh boy can you tell the difference when you try to mix them. The page I linked above (this one) has a little video about mixing paints, and also a link to a pdf with simple color-mixing recipes. I find this pdf tremendously helpful.

I'm looking at the colors on the circles of the other thing I made. One is sort of a teal, and I think it is just Claudine's Classic Teal lightened up a little bit with Blank Canvas, which is the white(ish) color (it may be slightly off-white, is why I'm hedging there). That's this row:

(Ignore the big swirly parts, that's the rub-ons. It's the paint in the circles that I'm concerned with here.) -- Then there's another green that I think I made by mixing Yellow Pastel and Sky Blue. It just looks like a fairly normal pale green.

And there are two purplish rows that I'm fairly sure are variations on the same mixture - Purple Palette plus Painterly Pink. One row leans more toward purple and the other one toward pink.

I'm pretty sure I just remixed those two using the same two colors, it's just the proportions.

So now I'm off to look at Claudine's mixing pdf for ideas!

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Here's my "monochromatic" quilt that I mentioned above:

Basically I used anything I had that could remotely count as green, and just mixed it all together. So there's blue-greens and yellow-greens, and pale greens printed on white and tan and maybe even yellow - as long as it "read" as green I used it. (I did end up throwing out some prints that too obviously had a lot of other colors in them; they were distracting, it turned out.)

I really have to finish this quilt someday. I finished the top, as you can see, and I even got the fabrics together to do the back of it, but I never quilted it. I even have the thread!

Back on the other topic... hmm, I could do an all-green version of the 8x8" grid thing.... this has possibilities.

Color schemes: blue and green

I love the colors they're using for the Winter Olympics:

 

This is a random curling photo I ganked from someplace; I picked it because you can see the wall of the ice rink pretty well in it. This same design (or at least a very similar one) seems to be on all the ice rinks and painted on fences, etc, all over the place. If you've watched any ice skating, you've seen the one there. I just think it's really beautiful. Blue and green is not a color scheme that's been extremely popular in recent years, but it's one I always liked. Water and earth, I guess.

Red and pink

Does anybody but me dislike red roses? I mean, there's not anything really wrong with them per se, they're just kind of boring. Especially at Valentine's Day, when it's hard to find anything but. So I was happy to see this article at D*S with something different: black hearts. Which are really beautiful.

The colors you see this time of year are pretty boring, on the whole. Valentine's stuff tends to be bright red and just a couple of shades of pink (and then the roses, which are not really bright red but a couple of shades darker - I guess true bright red roses are not an easy thing to achieve). I like red, and I like pink, too, I just think that people who make commercial Valentine merchandise could be a little more imaginative about the colors they use.

Beader's Color Palette

This isn't a new book and I'm sure y'all know all about it already, but I wandered by Margie Deeb's website and was interested to see that The Beader's Color Palette: 20 Creative Projects and 220 Inspired Combinations for Beaded and Gemstone Jewelry had been chosen as one of Library Journal's Best Books of 2009. It is a really good book.

(I love books about color, anyway, and I suppose I'm sort of a color junkie in general. I'll have to do a post about color one day.)