Colour swatches and poetic words

Green how I want you green. Green wind. Green branches.
Federico García Lorca

Colour swatches belongs in your journal. This months crusade is about colours and naming them. It’s a welcome reminder that the Art Journal is an ongoing experiment, and it should never become a fixed idea or filled with “similar pages”.

An Art Journal is a workplace, not an exhibition. Or call it a playground if you will, a place where magic can happen – but only if the rules are not set from the beginning, then it’s just theater…

It is perfectly okay to fill the pages with colour swatches and mix colours like a “mad scientist” on the pretty white pages, just for the fun of mixing colours. And mixing colours is a lot of fun. I mixed the only green I have (and it’s way to dark, like fake grass for me to like) with yellow to make it more spring green. And then with black to made it darker, like moss or grass laying in shadow.

Our 9 year old neighbor was over and doing her creative thing with fabric when I painted this. I asked her for help with naming the colours and she looked at me, puzzled and said:

– Blue, green, green, green, and green!?

Yeah, well… that’s all you need to know, right? It’s simple, but the prompt is really to name your colours… I tried to find hues I really like, then I used them on the next page. I think it’s a rainbow in green hues:

And now the naming part, the difficult part for me. I love the name we give colours generally, from shimmering emerald and spring-green to dark forest greens and jade. When I really tried to use my imagination I came up with a few suggestions to name my green hues! Like;

My Colour swatches are

• luminescent green – glows in the dark
• foliage shade #01 – paint your walls and welcome nature indoors
• kid’s greenery – it’s like a mix of salad, peas and spinach
• phosphorescent light – thin as air, use in well ventilated areas
• jealously blue – now you can have a jar too
• million dollar baby – the colour of cash, in a can (it’s for sale right now in your local paint shop)

Playing with these English words and I’m reminded of when I looked up variations of the colour red last year, the beginning of the monochromatic series in my art journal. Colour names can be so beautiful, so poetic! Maybe there is a poem in every colour here, waiting to be born in one of my notebooks?

I made another page with the green mixes:

Painted a girl with pink hair, covered in a snow storm of green swatches… I’m calling her Dot.

The combination of colour and colorful words is a world of its own, a world where I love to linger. Just like colours exists in uncountable hues, words can be combined in a gazillion combinations, and each time you find a combo you like, you’ve created a swatch of happiness.

For the whole prompt, read crusade 53 and then join us with your mix of colours and words!