Colour, Use It, Like An Artist, To Tell A Story. - Kathy Shell, Artist, Author, A Creative Life.

Colour, Use It, Like An Artist, To Tell A Story. 02/04/2010

Colour expressing mood, telling a story. Uluru, Central Australia, copyright watercolour, the art of Kathy Shell.

Every great design, every good painting, even our homes, should tell a story, and colour is used by the artist, designer, home owner, to tell that story.

To explain how colour can be used to tell a story, consider how the artist/decorator might consider making the interior and the external landscape outside the home, blend together to merge the edges between the inside and outside of a home.

I have always used considerable amounts of sun and sky, blue and yellow, with a lot of creamy white, when decorating, my open plan Australian homes where there has always been a considerable amount of sky, visible through generous sized windows. If a natural colour scheme is the basis of the home’s paint trim then the decorating colours, can be used to help blend your home interior with your exterior landscaping. Browns, greens, yellows and other earth tones will create a sense of camouflage.

If your home, is surrounded by trees, bushes, or flowering, plants, you may want to be influenced by nature and follow their lead. The romantic, dusty rose and green, has been a traditional colour scheme that has stood the test of time and works so well for the interior of homes with either a formal rose or informal rose based, cottage gardens. A Victorian purple home may look out of place by itself, but if the front lawn features a large display of purple flowers, or a gorgeous Jacaranda tree and lilac flowering shrubs, then it will have more visual interest. Look at your home's exterior during all four seasons and then decide what natural colours are predominant and suited to merging with the interior to create your home’s set in harmony with nature, story.

Similarly, if you are an artist, engaged in commercial art design, consider what your product is and what it claims to do, then use colour to express an emotion about that product. Colour is emotion, soft lilacs on cream, might belong on a doona cover of a peaceful romantic bedroom, but strong colours, like yellow used with red, strong hues of blue or blue green with sticking sharp contrasts on white or black might be used to design a publicity brochure or label on a bottle of hydroxycut.

You need to think of the ‘story’; you are telling when you select your colours.

I once had the joy of teaching a blind child what a colour was like. I told her ‘yellow was warm like sunshine, fresh like the fragrance and taste of a lemon and violet was warm and relaxing like the fragrance of lavender and violets and pink was pretty like the fragrance of a rose’. It gave me joy to see her so happy that for the first time, she felt she understood what colour would be like.

Yes, colour expresses emotions, affects our moods and tells a story.
Use it to express your story. J