First "Piece"

There's that moment of anxiety and excitement in any new endeavor when you declare your first "piece" to be complete and ready for public scrutiny--whether it be a student concert for a musician, or in my case a piece of stitching for my Textile Art course. Yesterday was assessment day for our Colour Theory subject. Our brief was to take a saying or situation that expresses emotion and translate that into a piece featuring colour and line. This represents the saying, "A change is as good as a holiday". There were lots of things that made me happy--particularly after weeks of little colour exercises and stitch samplers. The little coloured curls in the top right hand corner make me smile every time I see them. A moment of completion carries a challenge and hope for "next time". I'd like to challenge myself to be a little more adventurous. I'd also like to learn more about finishing a presenting a textile piece like this. Maybe there's a short course in framing coming up for me . . .

Colour Again

My Colour Theory folio is due in today. I spent some time yesterday tidying up all the little tasks we'd been given during the term. Thankfully it was only tidying up--I'd actually managed to stay pretty much up to date as we went along--yay! One exercise which we'd only spent a few minutes on caught my eye. The teacher handed out little squares of fabric and asked us to design a colour scheme to suit. The colour didn't impress me any--a warm neutral brown I guess you'd call it. The resulting colour scheme wasn't anything to get excited about either. Then I remembered this: It's a wall hanging I made years ago--after an autumn trip to the Adelaide hills. And there it is, a warm neutral brown that makes me happy. So now there's one extra picture in my Colour Theory folder.

Work in Progress

One of my homework tasks for my Colour Theory subject is to construct a colour wheel using snippets of colour taken from a magazine. I began flipping through pages and snipping out colour fragments on the weekend. Yesterday morning I did some more snipping and then started to stick things down. I've been using "Royal Auto" as my source: lots of landscape pics, cars, and ads of various kinds. Purples are rather thin on the ground and the gradations between colours are harder to find than I'd expected. I think I'll try to get hold of a different type of magazine and see whether that helps to fill in some of the gaps. As an exercise it's been enlightening and I can see my sensitivity to colour developing through it. Another homework task is to paint a colour wheel by mixing primary colours of paint. I think I'll tackle that one tomorrow.