What Color Tickles You?

"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you;
I am here to live out loud." --Emile Zola

This quote makes me want to just yell, "Yes!", every time I read it. It conveys what I feel on a deeper level. Without being too philosophical, let's say I don't want to randomly bounce through life just barely bumping the surface. I want the ball I bounce to be a a multicolored, light-pulsing sphere that leaves colors and craters, impacting the landscape where ever it lands. I am a complicated person with strings attached, and I choose to live this way. A friend has referred to this as 'lives within lives.' But as long as I have inspiration to move me forward, I can handle it, and it's all good.

I am inspired by many things in my life; people, history, nature, but perhaps, mostly, by color. Sometimes it's just the Pepsi sign in red and blue set off against a bubble gum pink wall. Red, blue, and pink aren't necessary friends on the color wheel, but this caused me to stop, and think, "I can see that working in a quilt." You, on the other hand, might possibly say, "Huh? How?"

I should come clean here. I like bubble gum pink-- so much I once painted a whole room in it. It was a can on the clearance table that day!  I saw a wall design in a magazine and thought, "Hey, I can do that." Then, I tweaked it. Here are some parts of the mural. Some parts are original, and others borrowed. I don't know who to give credit to.

How do we know what works with color?

Henri Matisse made it work here!

I would say to look around you at everything. Not just textiles or fabric colors, but store fronts, magazines, fashion, flower arrangements, merchandising--look at your soda can. IPA beer cartons are using great graphics these days, and hip colors. What color combinations make you FEEL something? Bubble gum pink may not be your trigger, but even the most color-passive person will pick out one shirt over another when given the choice. 

Be awake this week. 

A nice little website for basic color theory plus a lot more into the psychology of color is here:

Color Matters

Now off to my list. 

Come on, Doxie girls. 

Let's go sew.