An Investigation into Color
A creative prompt (and inspiration from Mary Gartside, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, Hilma af Klint and Alma Woodsey Thomas) to explore the color that's found all around us
Creative Fuel is a newsletter about the intersection of creativity and everyday life. Prompts are focused on helping us tap into our creative process, no matter our medium, and I send at least one per month to all subscribers. Paid subscribers have full access to the archive of prompts.
In honor of Women’s History Month, all of the weekly creative prompts during this month are going to be inspired by women artists.
I want to start this month with color. Why? First because we’re in a time of year when the color is starting to return. And even if we’re still in the damp gray of winter, there’s color somewhere. As
wrote yesterday, “If there is colour to be found, it’s in a shrivelled wild rosehip or the orangey stain of an old brown leaf on grainy white snow, or a lacy green-grey pancake of lichen on a fallen branch, but that’s about it.”Secondly: I love color. I love looking at it, I love experimenting with it, and I love the joy that comes with simply putting color on a page.
Let’s start with this question: color or colour? We are all on various sides of the pond, so I am just going to go ahead and interchangeably use these spellings, thereby adding more colo(ur) to this prompt. See what I did there?
Most of my professional work is actually in black and white, and I love the starkness and the graphic nature of working in positive and negative space. In all honesty, I also love its simplicity. It feels less complicated merely because there’s less choice. And perhaps this is why I love color so much, because in my personal creative practice I feel like I get to play and experiment and do something different than I would for work, so using color feels radical and indulgent.