Quick Sunday Art Journaling - Color

"Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways."

Oscar Wilde

This week's Positively Creative Art Journaling exercise was so straight forward and quick that there's no need for step by step photos. The prompt was to choose your favorite color, paint the spread with just that color, fill one side with squares of that color cut from magazines, then journal about the color on the other side, using the above quotation if we wished. Well, you all should know by now that my favorite color is teal green (or teal blue will do as well), and the green acrylic paint I've been using is close enough to what I consider teal. I diluted it a little with water and found it was not covering up the print on the page enough so painted again with a bit more undiluted. Rather than cut squares of teal from magazines, I just went to my fabric stash, starting with my shoebox of 1-1/2 inch squares and strips, then moving on to my regular stash. I mostly used commercial prints but there a few hand-dyes and a batik too.

In the supply list, Dale Ann had included matte medium in the adhesives, but so far there haven't been any instructions to use it. Yes, I have a bottle of it, bought a long time ago when I started playing with attaching different things to my quilts like foil. Several experienced art quilters who also dabbled in collage recommended I try it, so I bought some, then never got up the courage to give it a try. Well, probably more accurately, I never really had a project that I didn't already have a way that worked, and I never bothered to just try it on a sample. That's been my MO, something about waste not want not including time. But you know - this is a year about exploration. So to liven up the lesson with something new, I decided to try the matte medium instead of the glue stick I've been using. I don't know why I've been so skeptical about it, even as I was brushing it on the page. But of course, it worked like a charm, although like the acrylic paint I'm using, I was surprised at how quickly I needed to work before it dried requiring laying down another coat.

I really didn't know how to answer the questions suggested by Dale Ann, meant to get me thinking about why teal is so appealing. How does it make me feel, for instance? Well, I don't know. I just know that if I'm in a clothing store or fabric store, scanning the wares, and my eye falls upon teal, I can't seem to take my eyes off it. It draws me like a magnet, and I can't say why. I think it is a color that makes me look good. I know I feel very comfortable and relaxed when wearing it. Ditto when I work it into my quilts, which oddly enough I don't do as often as one would expect of a favorite color. Maybe that's because I don't think of teal paired with anything else, except brown, black or white. It's a stand alone color for me, one I was thrilled to develop a dye recipe for, my very own teal. I may not be able to put it into words, but teal definitely speaks to me and in a good way.

What about you? What's your favorite color and how does it make you feel?