Michelle Ward's Crusade Challenge
Some people are addicted to Sudoku, I cannot keep my virtual fingers away from Michelle Ward’s Crusade challenges. We’ve done some neat color challenges–from color evolution to naming your own colors, which brought Michelle (and her street team) to this color challenge: Think of a phrase or a word, then pick a color for it.
For someone who loves words and plays with colors, I reacted to this challenge like the dog who loves bacon.
My first choice was a verb: To blend. The color above reminds me of smooth, easy colors. So I chose this mix of cream and Naples yellow.
Could be a map, but it's a color called Passport
My second word was Passport. I thought of the first time I got on an airplane as a child and was horrified that I couldn’t see the state outlines like they had on maps. Passports remind me of borders and change. So this change of color seemed right.
A good color for a hard emotion.
Next was Retribution. I thought of it when I used the quote “Retribution is like stabbing yourself in the heart 1,000 times to hurt the other person.” This seemed just about right. It’s an experiment using clear tar gel and Quin Orange acrylic with glass beads for texture. It seemed the right color for pain and anger. And those glass beads could stand in for salt to rub in the wound.
Works even upside down.
The last two are just goofy. I had a series of yellow paint samples. On a brown background, the staircase could go either way. So this is called Staircase.
And finally, in honor of the summer that would not quit in Phoenix, I have Landscape. It’s a piece of handmade paper with grass inclusions. There are also paper inclusions that look like money. Which, of course, I would pay to make it cooler. Too obvious, maybe, but I couldn’t help myself.
Want to play with words and colors, but don’t have a studio full of paint and paper scraps? Here’s The Color Of: a website that will help you create colors. You type in a word, and it accesses images on Flickr that contain your word in the title or tags, then layers the main colors until it creates a blend. It’s fun.
–Quinn McDonald is a writer and artist who is thinking about her next book. Her first, Raw Art Journaling, has just been released on Kindle, after making it to the top of three categories at Amazon.com
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