Colorways

Sometime in the last few months I read an article or blog post, which I cannot now locate, in which a jewelry artist mentioned having found a thrift-store copy of a book called something like Color Combinations for Oil Painters which she regularly used in her design process.

Longtime readers will be able to predict that I was a little mystified by this for a moment, because I am a Bad Artist, or at any rate one who apparently functions a little differently from most.  After some thinking, I realized that most of this is a result of my style: I generally construct around a focal, so the combination of colors I should use is in front of me and it's a simple matter of finding surrounding shades -- I can't remember the technical name for them; the shade and tint or highlight/lowlight of a particular hue, and I know there's a name for that.  It's like if I had a focal that was orange and leaf green I would select beads in blood orange and canteloupe, forest and mint to set it off nicely.

Anyway.  Even when I'm doing without focals or creating my own, I generally work from a "character" or a "concept" or a "story" (I am leery of these terms, and thus place them in scare quotes) rather than a color combination.  I make jewelry for the characters in manga I read, I dream up jewelry to go with suggested wedding themes in design blogs I run across, I pick leftover beads out of the cups in my bead board and make something with those to avoid sorting them back, I imagine my earrings based on the hairstyle they'd suit or what color M has complained about not having enough of lately.  I can come to the bead board thinking "Okay, aqua, brown and olive," as I did with this (older) piece:



But that's a challenge.  I suppose that means I should be doing it more.  But it's much more natural for me to start picking stuff out while my brain repeats "a dragonfly that landed in a glass of iced lemonade" (yes, really; I didn't have enough crystalline yellows for that one to work) or "Mempis city rain" or "that minute when they first come into Rivendell in The Fellowship of the Ring."  This is really just another part of my love affair with words: Color names are more inspiring to me than color shades.

If there happens to be any other designer like me, I have found this a handy resource: Randall Munroe's color survey worked out how people name various web colors -- sorted by colorblindness and sex-at-birth.

Other than that, I resolve that sometime this month I am going to take one of those jewelry color-choice tools and actually use it for an actual piece of jewelry.  So there, brain.

So there.