I had a eureka moment today.

I’ve been talking about recording my day. This has come from the recording (and subsequent obliteration) of mess.

I’ve been trying to draw my days in simplified lines with layers of elements from my day.

I also wanted to think about colour and using my Pantone chips. Originally I wanted to represent my daily emotions in colour – but as that doesn’t change THAT much and I’d have a tendency to choose the same colours over and over because I like them – I decided not to concentrate on emotion.

Instead I decided to pick 9 colours from my day. It is easier to do this in retrospect as the colours become easier to determine. So I’m writing down a day in brief title and writing down a descriptive colour eg. Laptop red. Charcoal pavement. And finding the closest Pantone chip to my memory of the colour. I display the chips 3×3 and start top left to bottom right in order I noted down the words. Once recorded, I could play with the chips and mess around with the orders. So far I’ve done 3 and I already adore the choice of 1 of the days.

But the eureka moment is thinking about my earlier landscape work. Whilst these (I assumed) were about memory and trying to create a sense of calm, they are also about RECORDING the colours that created that sense of calm. I struggled with trying to extract the colours or what to do with them. But this recording method is perfect. Even my photographs are mostly about recording colours.

The colours I choose for the chips are important because they instill a ‘feeling’ in me (blue sky sunshine etc) or because it was a strong colour I remember from a certain part of my day.

I know from my colour research last year that your perception of colour changes constantly and is always affected by mood and circumstance, so choosing the same colour on many days may not result in the same chip. Nor may the combination of colours result in the same appearance of the chip than when it is isolated etc. being affected by the colours around it.

Therefore they are on a whiteboard with white magnets and black pen to try to avoid colour influencing of the chosen chips.

I’m really excited by recording these colours and what I can do with the ‘bank’ of palettes that result.