Colour Theory

Our doll club was privileged to have Marie Browning give a talk at the last meeting. If you’re not aware of who Marie is, lets just say she’s a crafter/artist extraordinaire. She has written tons and tons of books, is connected to so many organizations and is in such high demand, that we were so fortunate that she was able to fit us into her hectic schedule. You can see more of her work here.

Marie talked to us about colour theory. Sometimes it can be a dry topic but she made it so interesting. She gave us a quick and easy exercise to do. It was so simple but makes the concept of colour theory so much fun and easier to understand. Simply put, she gave us little pictures of various things, a piece of card stock and we brought some trims to share with each other. We attached the pictures to the top of the card then you simply study the colours in the pictures and find trims to attach below the picture both in the colours you find and the proportion of those colours.

What the exercise is meant to teach is to observe what you’re really looking at, the variety of colour, the amounts of each colour and how the proportions of each create the palette within the picture. Some colours are intense, some you hardly see, and others take up much of the space, But whatever you look at after doing this simple exercise, then forces you to pay more attention to colour and the many variables of it.

If you do this exercise yourself you can build quite a collection of cards that you can use as a reference tool when and if you need to know how certain colours might look together. Here are the two cards I’ve done so far. The funky little buttons came from one of the ladies at my table and just seemed to be the perfect thing to use. Aren’t they fun.