Remake of a boring intro to Colour Play

February 20, 2025

What a strange time it's been, both incredibly exciting and outrageously upsetting.  It's no wonder that I derailed when making the first intro to the new workspace, Colour Play in Art.  This morning, I began again ... without a script and without having had my first cup of coffee.  It's much more authentic. Professional or not, this time around I spoke from my heart.

It's been over ten years since I invented The Colour Scheme Game for myself.  I wanted to learn how to manipulate colours to work with one another to create more expressive work.  For three years I played the game every morning, That was how my daily colour play practice began.  I've continued my daily colour practice, but not always playing the game.  In fact, rarely playing the game since I began foraging for plants and minerals to make dyes and pigments.  I haven't played the game in a way that explores the subtle nuances that beautiful saddened colours and neutralized colours can play a major role in enhancing the more saturated colours in a sketch or painting, in a quilt or in a photograph.  

In 2024 my daily colour practice focused on colour mapping my environment.  I learned to observe even more carefully the colours I am able to discern, colours I had been blind to before.  I'm continuing my daily colour mapping practice with a few variations, variations that lead toward applying the colour mapping to studio work and travel sketches.  Without applying what I learn to my work, what point is there in learning it?  Knowledge without application can become quite frustrating and burdensome.  I am reminded of the dozens of colour wheels I made before 2008 when I finally learned how to use a colour wheel as a valuable reference when working.  Same for colour charts.  After seeing the beautiful colours I could create, I only became frustrated by not knowing how to put them all together in paintings to express whatever it was I wanted to express.

mandala painted with natural dye inks

Colour has become one of my greatest joys, not only in my art but in my everyday activities.  I see more colour.  I can almost hear it, taste it and smell it.  In the new intro video I mention how I now feel that I have filters on my eyes that I can switch back and forth, altering the colours I'm seeing and watching the adjacent colours change to harmonize.  It's a fascinating and unexpected benefit of my years of daily practice.  The key, I believe, is having allowed and even forced the daily practice to change, to morph from one experiment to another, allowing myself to dive down into rabbit holes and follow the tunnels until I felt restless and found myself needing to wee what was down another rabbit hole.

pillowcase dyed using avocado pits

dyed with red rose petals

In Colour Play in Art I encourage artists to do the same.  Find or create a practice that works for you.  We each have to find our own methods that work and then use those methods until they don't work any more.  Then it's time to find a new method.  

Exploring how to obtain colour from plants has been mind boggling. It's nothing like mixing pigments.  It's chemistry, it's alchemy.  From red rose petals I get gorgeous violets.  From purple delphinium I get beautiful greens, from avocado pits and skins I get peachy pinks.  When I turn dye baths into lake pigments I can get a variety of colour from the same dye bath by using modifiers.  It's fascinating and inspiring. It's made me realize that I've only scraped the surface in my studio work, incorporating these mysteries of colour onto paper and canvas.

detail of collage

Whether you join me in Colour Play or not, I will continue to share my adventures in colour here on my blog.  2025 promises to be an exciting year for my art and hopefully for your's too.

Thank you for reading my blog.

Chris Carter