Tag Archives: color

Nov11

May I Recommend Wall Stenciling Part II

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May I Recommend Wall Stenciling Part II

The castle brick and forest pansy tree were hand painted on this entry way by an artist for $1,500.  It’s a lovely, dramatic entryway that is viewed from a great room.  Creating a thematic hand painted wall may be out of the skill set for the average person.  However, it is possible to easily create a dramatic entryway, a single wall or a complete room using fabulously designed stencils.  It’s really quite easy.

Tools are simple and available from art stores, as well as hardware stores.  What is important is getting the right tool for the right job.  Special brushes and paint rollers produce different effects.  One of the wall effects I have done was to create stripes by simply using tape, a roller, and gloss paint.  It was so amusing to me to watch guests touch the walls to see if it was wallpaper!

Here are some photo examples of the process:

 

Here is the completed project:

I love the stencil collection offered by Cutting Edge Stencil from Etsy.com.  Having finally decided on which stencil to try out, the one above, I am excited to get started.  In the meantime, here is one more stencil project to wet your decorating appetite:

 

 

This is so easy to do, and the results so lovely and dramatic.  Hope you will try this too!

 

 

This concludes my recommendation for Wall Stenciling.  Let me know what you think, leave a comment by clicking on the tiny red comment text below.

Sep13

Adjust Feelings with Color: Heal Thyself

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Adjust Feelings with Color: Heal Thyself

Ever take a color test?  I took one the other night.  Surprisingly, it came fairly close to describing my present situation.  Well, at least it gave me more information than a fortune cookie.  I always find such tests amusing, especially the ones in magazines.  They’re great for killing time while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room.  But this one gave me food for thought and I wondered if such a test could be useful.  It wouldn’t change a situation or a condition or mood.  And It probably wouldn’t be in an American psychological science journal. Still, I wondered couldn’t it just be another tool in our emotional toolbox.  You know the saying, “If you don’t like something, change it.  If you can’t change it, change your attitude” (Maya Angelou).

What’s the first thing you do to change your attitude, your feelings?  Pray? Read self help books?  Take up a new hobby?  Exercise?  Start a new project?  Go shopping?    You could take a color test. Or just build a color map.  But first you need to know how a color affects you personally. It takes a book, and a rather thick one, to sufficiently discuss all of the colors. So I’ll just summarize one:  yellow.

Yellow Floral with Fringe

One of the more popular accent pillows in my collection is yellow.  In Western culture, its positive symbolic meaning is brightness, happiness, stimulation, alertness, warmth, wisdom, order, logic and much more.  Every color has a negative side.  Yellow, for example, can mean caution and fear.  Seeing this in a magazine, I once redecorated my bedroom with exquisite blue and white bed linen and painted the walls yellow. Five days later, I dug out an emergency credit card; telephoned a painter; and cried that I hadn’t slept in 5 nights, that I needed him to repaint the room not soon—but right NOW.

How we “see” color is a complex process.  What follows here is an oversimplification of the process.  I offer it only to show that color also has a physiological influence on each of us and in different ways.  As with all colors, yellow affects each of us differently based upon our physiological and cultural differences. Each of us has three color receptors (blue, red and green) called cones that are stationed behind our retinas.  These cones are stimulated by light producing electromagnetic wavelengths, producing long, medium and short wavelength.  The red cone is stimulated by long wavelengths, green by medium and blue by the short wavelengths.  When the red and green cones are stimulated, yellow is perceived.  Your green and red cones being less sensitive to yellow wavelengths in a bedroom may in fact enjoy it, while my green and red cones clearly finds it torturous!  Hues, shades, tints and value also influence how well we tolerate or enjoy a color.

What’s really important is learning how a color affects you. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should avoid a color because it is over or under stimulating, but to use it in quantities that best adjust your feelings.  Face it, if you are experiencing irritating situations, than red is a color you want to use sparingly or not at all.

Whether you choose to adjust your feelings with color in the home, your garden, your wardrobe or even a new car, know that it is a journey, an exploration to be enjoyed.  Color is all around us, celebrate it. We are blessed to be able to see–and be influenced by it.

There is so much more to be said about using color to adjust feelings, but this blog must end somewhere.  I hope the information has been of some value. There is a wealth of information just on the internet and I have tried to include a few of the links to the information I gathered.  This has been fun.

 

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Aug31

Adjust Feelings with Color Part II: Rage to Calm

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Adjust Feelings with Color Part II: Rage to Calm

A neighbor’s cat examines my calm decor.

I worked in Washington D.C. for 18 years but lived in Virginia than Maryland than back to Virginia.  One commutes to DC by metro, commuter bus, slugging, and driving. It once took me 4 hours just to drive less than 25 miles from Springfield, Virginia to my home!  (Even on 911, I got home faster!) I lived five minutes from I-95 but my average commute was one hour both ways.  Auto accidents; bumper tapping; running out of gas; turned over semi tractor trailers; and too much traffic all led to daily creeping traffic.  Get the picture?  If you commute more than 30 minutes to work each way and travel on busy roads or interstates, than you know what I’m describing here:  a descent into daily frustration, anger and often—just rage.

That’s how I often felt when I arrived home.  When I opened the door, I saw a lovely sofa with large deep colored jewel toned flowers and two matching dark burgundy slipper chairs.  I grew to hate them.  On summer days, they made me feel hot and angry.  In the winter they just made me feel old and tired.

Emphasis on Jeweled Tones

A six year redecorating project ensued.  I accumulated shelves filed with decorating books, stacks of home decor magazines, and a folder filled with torn out magazine pages of fabulously decorated rooms.  Each book, each magazine touted decorating principles; exhausted color schemes; detailed the how to’s; displayed glossy picture after glossy picture of polished, professionally decorated rooms.  Some books even sent me to my closet to examine every garment for color and texture to discover my “taste.” Yet, not one asked the key question:  what do you feel or want to feel when you look at a sofa, a chair, a table, a whatever.  Did you ever buy linen, furniture, accessory groupings or even paint the walls because it looked pretty in a magazine?  I did.

I did until I had an epiphany (I love that word).  My epiphany was this:  I can like, even love a thing but not necessarily want to live with it.  (Okay, so you may already knew this—or not.)  It led to that other key question:  how do I use color to adjust my feelings—when they needed adjusting.  Gradually, I eliminated primary colors, its shades and tints and hues and patterns from every room.  Everything was neutral.  I studied colors, visited art museums and public gardens.  I knew I wanted order and calm when I first walked in my home.  I wanted to see and feel peace.

I played it safe with neutral colors and lots of texture. I punched in other colors sparingly using prints and paintings, small decorative objects, pillows and throws.  Still, I wanted deep colors that caressed me and made me feel safe.  So in smaller rooms such as the TV room, I painted the wall a deep slate blue.

Oops! Where are my pillows?

One day, after the usual anger-filled commute, I arrived home and as I walked pass the great room, I stopped in the middle of the hall. My sight zoomed in on a garden vista. The bearded irises had bloomed.  They were drop dead gorgeous.  I smiled.

Stately Bearded Iris

That was my last home before I left Virginia.    Now I’m in North Carolina; I have to start all over but my color map to adjust my feelings is there for me.  Do you know what colors calm you?  Learn more about colors in the final post in this series: “Heal Thyself.”

 

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Aug28

Fractal Art

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Fractal Art

Color Wheel Wallpaper

You may be asking what on earth does fractal art have to do with designing pillows or adjusting feelings with color.  Everything, I say.  It’s an adventure, an exploration in combinations of colors in shades, hues, and tones; detailed patterns intricately formed, sometimes seemingly casually formed; and an invitation into the world of endless imagination. I was searching the internet for a color wheel when I found this.  I thought it more like a sunburst–wild, chaotic, and bursting with energy.  I was mesmerized. Can I someday create pillow covers with so much excitement!  After all, a pillow cover is my canvas.

The creator of this image is Vicky Brago-Mitchell.   When I contacted Ms. Brago-Mitchell for permission to include some of her work in my blog, part of her response was ”. . . my fractals were first printed by me on address labels and given to my K students as behavior rewards.  Worked better than candy!”

So what is fractal art?  As I understand it, it is a visual representation of fractal geometry.  Here is the best description I found from Amazing Seattle Fractals written for non mathematicians,  lay people like me:

“In the broader sense, fractals are complex, patterns & forms found throughout the natural world. Relative to this art form, they are complex computer generated images, or designs, of amazing form, detail, color and light. They are created using mathematical formulas, and are infinite in their ability to be viewed in ever increasing detail. The closer you look (zoom into a fractal) the more detail there is.

Each image represents, or is similar, to it’s parent image. This “self similar” principle is characteristic to fractals. Like a fern, each frond is similar, but not exactly the same.

Fractals can be incredibly mundane, or extraordinarily beautiful! New formulas create new fractals, ….”

Again, as I understand, the roots of fractal geometry can be traced to the late 19th century.  However, as Ms. Brago-Mitchell states, the theory for fractal art was “developed in the 1970s and 80s by French mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010), and are created by repeating simple patterns billions and trillions of times. Until today’s fast computers became widely available, only mathematicians had seen fractals; now everyone can enjoy their intricacy and beauty.”  All you need to create fractal art is a computer, a fractal program or generator.  You can purchase these programs from such people as Steven Ferguson and follow the tutorial at Amazing Seattle Fractals.  Actually, it looks like fun for children and adults.

I tried to find my favorite image by Ms. Brago-Mitchell but at each turn of the page, I would find another.  I was like a kid in a candy store. Her site displays images for computer screens and fractal art set to music (very lovely).  And her work can be purchased in poster sizes.  (There are of course lots of other fractal artists.)  Here are two I like among a long list of favorites:

Gossamer-wallpaper

 and

Okay, one more