Color for a Rainy Day
It's very gray here in New England today. People were bustling around with umbrellas, trying to get under awnings and ducking in and out of stores when I was in town. I don't mind the rain so much, but I do miss the sunshine. All the gray seems to bring my energy down to a snail's pace and active things take an extra effort. Rainy days are fabulous for curling up with a good book, napping, watching good movies, and snuggling up your favorite animal. But if that isn't an option, there are many ways to bring some light into the day. Making art is one way. I love to surround myself with supplies and have an art picnic on the floor, just creating spontaneously with no end in mind.
My walls are covered in art, so at the moment adding some bright color wouldn't work for me. But if I had a larger space to work with, I imagine it would be quite fun to add some drama to the walls. Benjamin Moore has a great website with lots of great information about color. You can play with changing the walls, trim, and accents of different rooms in all sorts of wild colors and also get some great advice about how to choose the colors for your rooms.
Another great way to play with color combinations, whether it be for a piece of art or home decoration, is to look at the combos you see in nature. If it looks good in nature, it's going to look good elsewhere. I get a lot of inspiration this way. In the Dark Tree painting above, I was inspired by the look of dark wet trees after a rain storm against the bright orange fall leaves.
As you see great color combos in nature, in magazines, in art, it's helpful to have a place to keep them all. You might want to start an inspiration folder or book. I have a little of both, a folder to catch things and then a sketchbook to write down ideas and also to paste in images as I seem them. Collecting beautiful things that inspire you is a wonderful thing no matter whether you use them or not. Play with mixing watercolors or oil pastels as you fill up your inspiration book. Color mixing can lead to endless color combos.
Looking for more colorful inspiration? Check out Pantone's website. Pantone has created a great color matching system (each color gets a number) that helps match colors across systems (computer to print for example) in the graphic design world and elsewhere. And for some color related fun, check out their Colorstrology page which links a color to each day, which describes the characteristics of people born that day. Mine was pretty accurate! :-) Interested in the psychology of color? Here's some info on that. And here's another place to play with paint color choices in different imaginary rooms, using True Value Paint.
