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.

It's not easy being green

I was supposed to be studying earlier so of course I went and started making a necklace instead:

I've been intending to do a green necklace for ages, and especially so since I bought this green clay nautilus at the Bead Society show. (I'll have to go look the maker's name up, later - I've forgotten.) The beads on the right are what I was thinking of as my "palette" and the beginning of the necklace itself is on the left. I'm really pleased with it so far. The bead at the very bottom, which looks clear but is actually very pale green, is made from a recycled coke bottle. I happened to pick this particular one up and noticed that it was drilled off-center, so I decided to hang it accordingly. The beads are a little bit of everything - polymer clay, glass, stone, even a little bit of plastic. I haven't decided how long the necklace should be - not really too long, I think, but I haven't narrowed that down too much. Oh well - since I started from the bottom I don't have to decide that just yet, anyway!

Calorie-free donuts!

This is what I made in the class today (plus one I made after I got home), using some of those Swarovskis and Delicas I was talking about yesterday:

I love these - except maybe the one on the bottom left which I admit looks kind of odd, especially in this picture. Here are the colors I used:
top: bicones are palace green opal, Delicas are color-lined leaf green
bottom left: bicones are rose, Delicas are hot pink (I think color-lined also)
bottom right: bicones are Indian red, Delicas are yellow silk

(If anybody is a Delicas junkie and really wants to know, I can get the color numbers for you - just ask me in comments. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen, though!)

I suspect that I will end up dismantling and recycling the orange-and-yellow one, because even though I rather like it, I don't quite know what to do with it and Swarovskis are too ridiculously expensive to just leave sitting  around in an I-like-it-but-it-doesn't-quite work kind of project. And I have some ideas for other things to try!

These are maybe a little over an inch wide, by the way, although I didn't think to measure. The bicones are 4mm. And the idea is Kay's. She had done some with bright colors and gold Delicas that were adorable - that's another thing I'm going to have to try.

Still more shopping

This is part of the stuff I bought at the quilt show. For those of you who don't already know this, the big quilt show in Houston has sort of a "bead corner" - officially called Embellishment. There weren't as many bead vendors as there have been in other years, I thought, but there was enough for me to go seriously over budget with, just the same. (The show was earlier than usual this year, which probably threw everybody's schedules into disarray, I figure.)

This is basically in order from lowest to highest expenditure:

1. Beyond Beadery mostly specializes in seed beads, which are not my weakness, but I still managed to buy quite a few things. They had a lot of really cute charms and drops, plus I got this idea to use the biggest size of seed beads (3/0) to do something with a sort of 60s boho sort of vibe, as demonstrated at the bottom of this picture:

My mother had this really goofy necklace in those colors along about 1969, I guess that's why that screams 60s to me. Anyway, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with those wreath charms, quite, but I'm in love with tricolor things these days so I'm going to figure something out. And the others are probably earrings-to-be.

2. April Melody. Somebody on the Texas Beaders list said that April specializes in "fancy glass" and that's one of my weaknesses, but I tried to restrain myself by sticking with one color:

I love love love those both of those spirals, the green ones and the copper. (I'm wishing I had bought some more of the copper ones, they are too perfect together.) The rounds at the top are vintage. And I had a fake-Pandora bracelet that had room for a few more beads, so that's what the three silver-core beads are for. The beads I had already were blue and white, so the green goes really well with them. I'll have to remember to take a picture of it.

(And I don't have pictures of my third and most expensive stop yet. That will have to be a separate post.)


Oh, and in case anybody's thinking, "But weren't there any quilts at the quilt festival?" There were, and I didn't take any pictures again this year - I didn't even have my cell phone with me - but here are the quilts that won awards. (If you're a geek like me, you will especially appreciate the Tolkien quilt, which is on about the 4th row down - and you can click on the picture to see a bigger version with more detail. It's really really cool.)