Mosaic workout challenge, week 4: Monochrome

Last week we played with black and white (don’t forget to check out what people made), this week we got to play with colour. But only one! Yep, we had to pick one hue and run with it. Yikes. I’m so clueless when it comes to colour, and I also don’t tend to keep a big assortment of colours in stock, given that I tend toward rocks. What I did seem to have in abundance, oddly enough, was orange. And so my choice was made for me!

"Dry spell" -- terracotta, brick, smalti, and vitrogota
“Dry spell” — terracotta, brick, smalti, and vitrogota

Title: Dry spell

Size: 5″ x 4.125″

How long did it take to complete? About 3.5 hours

Love or hate this workout? This one kind of terrified me because I don’t work in colour very much (other than muted earth tones). In the end, it wasn’t too painful :-)

Happy with the result? I was short on time this week, so I just kind of threw myself into this one without really any planning at all. I like the result well enough, but there are some things about the lines that bug me (more specifically, I wish they echoed the soft triangular shape of the vitrogota better).

What did I learn? The hardest part was selecting the palette, which, I recognize, was the point of the challenge. I got as far as ‘orange(ish)’, and then was kind of stumped in terms of finding the various shades, tints, and tones – this was owing to both my limited stock and my limited knowledge of colour. Some of my initial selections had a bit more of a yellow hue to them and then I got paranoid that I wasn’t really following the rules of the challenge. As a result, my palette didn’t end up being really varied (within my chosen hue) and I ended up playing around with texture more than colour. Oops. So key lesson: I need to do some book learnin’ about—and experimenting with—colour.

dry spell - detail

2 Comments

Julie, I LOVE your 3 generations piece. I’ve always worked with that idea in mind, some kind of themed project is inspiring to me! I’m working on a piece on an old 6 paneled window from my nieces house. She had asked for a beach design as she lives right by the ocean. So I’m collecting sand from the beach she lives on and using that as a base. I’ll just have to figure how how to glue the sand down….should be a fun project.
Thanks for sharing, I love your work.

Let me know what you think!

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