colour therapy

Days are long at the moment, and too often the temptation is to simply fall down at the end of the day and bask in inactivity and slob-dom. But when I spotted this beautiful colour theory project that Merrilee had used to make Valentine's cards from, all that red gave me a giant burst of energy.

My version was not-for-cuts, on a big-kid sized piece of watercolour paper.

I started out with a test sheet, to make sure that I could manage to draw straight lines, and liked the colours I'd picked... good job I did practice, as it ended up looking rather like a sample of Eighties' lipsticks. Orange you glad orange isn't still in fashion? 

(Note: after a brief Google search, it seems orange lipstick is slated to be the big thing for Spring 2011. Shows what I know about fashion)

Moving onto the real deal, I drew up a grid in pencil, making each square 1x1".




And then the colours started to appear.

At first I found myself over-thinking it, and imposing rules on myself: no two adjacent squares of the same colour, not more than two orange squares per row, not more pinks than reds, and on and on. 

It became rather much more enjoyable when, fifty or sixty squares in, I thought "sod that" and started to feel the colours. Well, that and I started to slop so much paint onto the brush that it tended to drip into another square before I reached the one I was going for.

Repeat after me: "Free your paintbrush, free your mind."

There really was some kind of perverse satisfaction in letting the paint ooze out of those tidy little squares, in seeing the splatter, in getting paint on our table in allowing mess.



Definitely a satisfying way to spend an evening, and even more exciting, when I woke up this morning all of the paints had dried into completely different colours -- better colours, in my opinion.

Now it's pegged up in the living room -- a reminder of the energy that colour can summon up, even on the long days.