Make It Mondays – Orange

I figured I’d take a break from cleaning up the studio to jump back into making art with both feet. A challenge seemed a good place to start, so I took up the Orange challenge over at Lisa Vollrath’s Make It Mondays. I’ve never participated in Make It mondays before (or any other blog challenge for that matter) and I had a lot of fun with it. This was an interesting challenge; color challenges seem to have an interesting effect on me. They are deceptively simple, but I always find that interesting themes and meanings can surface.

I find color challenges tend to follow a pattern for me. I took some pictures of the process to illustrate how I make color-themed collages. First, I sort through all my bins of collage papers and pull out elements of the color in question. My collage elements are all sorted into obsessive little 8.5″x11″ clear plastic bins. I started with the “Orange” bin of course, but I ended up finding loads more scattered throughout bins such as “Postal,” “People” and “Misc Collagey Elements”.

Once I’ve gathered up plenty of elements, I sort them out into potential backgrounds, smaller images, and ATC blanks. As you can see from the photo, I also pulled a few orange pigments out at this point – craft acrylics, a Sharpie, and a pigment inkpad. I find it’s very useful to have some pigments on hand, especially for color challenges. You never know what the right thing is going to be to tie it all together. Which I guess is the reason I pull so many elements out… when the only requirement in that you use a certain color, it can be hard to predict what sorts of elements will work.

After all this fiddly preliminary stuff is when the magic happens. I start arranging things, playing around, keeping an eye out to see what themes present themselves. For the color orange, I found that the themes that surfaced were an exotic Far East theme, a city heat-wave theme, and a summer morning theme. As you can see, it was the summer morning theme that I ended up going with. (The inkpad came in handy to highlight the edges of the cards and blend the elements together.) I’m hoping to work on the other two cards tomorrow, but it started to feel like something of a heat-wave in the studio so I decided to call it a night after the first card.