This colour chart was made early last summer, when the days were light and sunny and being told to stay home – and paint and sew – seemed like a luxury! Nearly a year on the motivation to be creative and use our time productively has somewhat waned. The paint chart developed from an idea I’d seen in a shop window, a print of fifty watercolour dots entitled The Colours Of Summer, which I thought could easily be applied to a location or specific place. I masked off a hundred squares – deliberately wonky – and set about mixing my watercolours to create all the different shades. The part I particularly enjoyed was thinking about the names I would designate to each colour. And then I went and spoiled the whole thing ………………..
I can’t believe I added that heading in the harsh black, badly written and no planning on the spacing. I can’t even chop it off without having to paint in the awful ‘f’ with the big loop! So it’s been relegated to under the bed in the spare room! However, I was inspired to get it out again when I saw an exercise in a new book I have called Expressive Stitches. Jan Dowson, the author, suggests making a ‘marking grid’, recording various marks on a variety of squares which could then be translated into stitch. She has called it the ‘Fifty Square Challenge’ but I only have thirty five in my example below. I’ve used a very large piece of paper, almost A2 size, so that it can fit into my biggest sketchbook. I did the majority of it yesterday, just finishing a few odd marks this morning and I’ve loved doing it, very relaxing.
I decided to annotate the squares, writing suggestions for stitches and what the marks may be appropriate for – pebbles, birds and so on. The piece will just slip inside my large sketchbook.
JOLLIETEXTILES 