Subtle Desert Colors

The colors of the desert circulate around subtlety. The greens are grayed and lean toward blue, sometimes. The grays are are somewhat blue, yet have touches of brown.

When mixing colors for desert watercolors, you move from bright, pure colors to their complements, those that are more teal and taupe and gray.

One of my charts takes phthalo blue and combines it with yellow ochre and raw sienna. As the two colors mix, first a big puddle of one with a touch of the other, the color dips toward the desert.

An agave plant in a pot, photographed against a stucco wall, has those tones. I can see the blues and the browns as I ask myself the question, "What colors could I use to create this plant in watercolor?"

It's that subtlety that I am learning to see as I take out paints and find a palette that works.

Sockie Samples

My computer and I were big buddies this week as I wrote and rewrote a knitting pattern for my company, Graywood Designs. The work is exacting. The math has to be correct. The photography must be instructive and motivating. It's a big job. 

Choosing colors for samples is critical, since colors that have little appeal translate into a design that is seen as so-so. This design, a little sock that teaches how  to knit a sock, doesn't have to fit anyone's foot. It just has to be a fun and educational project. 

This week's colors for the pattern are bright and punchy. When arranged on my dining table in morning light, they look great and photograph even better. Maybe I can stick with these and knit some more samples this weekend. 

Orange Crush

The big orange daylilies on the south side of the garage are in full bloom. It's the time of the summer when I realize that I have a crush on orange. Today I gathered some of those daylilies and put them into a little arrangement.

Then I hunted up some more things that are orange. The wool yarn is named "Orange You Glad;" the orange coffee mug is a gift from Peter. The crochet potholder uses ombre cotton in the color, you guessed it, orange.

Maybe orange is a color that can be a little much. Then again, maybe, if you have a crush on orange, it's just fine.

IKEA Agaves

Sue, my landscape person in Arizona, left me some agave pups way back in February or March. She dug them out of the landscaping and thought I might like to pot them up. I let them dry for several weeks and then tackled the job of getting them into pots.

The plants were twisted and jerky looking when I left Arizona in mid-March. I found a sheltered place for them, next to a wall in filtered east light with an irrigation spaghetti line close by. Sue said she'd watch and move the water line from pot to pot.

The twisty, jerky plants are liking their pots. They are growing and look great with the little IKEA children's chairs against the adobe-look wall near the front door. The pups got to spend several days looking swell. Then the chairs came inside and the pup pots got returned to the filtered light garden where they will spend the hot desert summer.

Ah, color and plants. A great combination, along with people who like stuff that grows.

Copyright 2012
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Color Study: Red Violet & Green

The more I learn about digital photography, the more I find that I don't know. Here's a color study that began as a digital image taken with my Blackberry smartphone. I added the frame, the text and the brush stroke effect in Photoshop.

From a weak photo of fabric strips cut for a quilt project, the image has emerged as a fairly strong color study of a possible palette of colors for a quilting project.