The photo prompt for this week is Palette, which to me means take ALL your YELLOW supplies and make swatch cards, and here is how I did it.
My preferred way to swatch out paint is to use a nice 140 lb. watercolor paper which can easily handle any different type of medium, cut the paper into small rectangles, I cut mine at about 3×4 which fit perfectly in the baseball card sleeves. I’m going to start a color swatch binder and I’ll easily have a reference of all of my supplies sorted by color! If I knew I was going to put them in the baseball sleeves before I did the swatches, I would have made sure that all the samples were oriented the same way but at least this way they are all in one place and to me, done is better than perfect! I love that I still have room to add more to each card (I just bought a set of broad point PITT pens in yellow) and it’s almost infinitely expandable in the binder.
I put every type of media I had on those cards including embossing powder and for some of the sprays or inks I added water because they still react to water after they are dry (this is an important point if you are planning to do a mixed media page and don’t want it to spread color in another layer). You can see that the Lindy’s Sprays and Distress ink still reacts to water after it’s dry (I found this pretty interesting, I thought the Lindy’s would be permanent). I did use a piece of white cardstock to swatch out the dry media such as pencils and markers, but I think I’m going to go back and redo those on the watercolor card because at the moment they don’t fit in the sleeves.
Once you’ve finished creating your swatches, you can start pulling other colors that you want to work with. Grab a color wheel (or look one up online) and look for complimentary (contrasting) or analogous (next to) colors on the color wheel. I found a fun free printable workbook here that is about Color Theory, it’s meant for children but I think we can just channel our inner first grader and have fun coloring! It all depends on what sort of look you want to achieve in your final project (and if you don’t know, that’s perfectly fine too!) You can see in the palette I chose for my project, I’m using purple, which is a complementary color to yellow because it is directly across it on the color wheel. That provides a good amount of contrast and purple brings me back to my comfort zone of the cooler colors.
I’ve had several people mention that they would prefer to use fabric as their medium of choice. Well, that’s absolutely fine of course, but it’s difficult to swatch out a piece of fabric. For my project page, I decided to just cut a small square of each fabric and staple it in with my tiny attacher, if you’re only using fabric, this can be a great jumping off point to decide what other colors you want to work with. I like that purple in the bowling pins so I looked around and grabbed some paper that had a similar group of colors.
It’s been so fun to see everyone playing along with the first week’s photo prompt, plus the other projects you’ve created! Be sure to snap a photo and tag me (@piececraftlove) and use the hashtag #pclcolorchallenge to be included in the entries for the drawing! And don’t be afraid to tag ANY posts you create with yellow! If you’re inspired to create a full on project before the end of the month, I’d LOVE to see it!
In fact, did you see the mixed media card, art journal page and mini albums I’ve made this week, ALL USING YELLOW!? I shared them on Instagram but here they are again for your viewing pleasure.
Do you want to check out the YELLOW color options over at the shop? Here’s a handy link for that!
Want to see the products I used to create the mini albums? Here’s a handy link for that!
Want to know what tools I use ALL THE TIME when I work in my Crafty Cave? Check them out here!
Until next week,
Happy Crafting!
Anna
I’m not organized or patient enough to swatch out my products, but I did make a yellow card which I posted on IG! Have to admit, I even like it–haha! Hopefully so does the blog friend it’s going to.