~free~ color-theory inspired diy

i love colors.

i love josef albers, though i am ashamed to call this a josef albers diy, because it's not rigorous enough. but maybe i'll try doing one of his real exercises ("make two colors make like the same color by putting them on different backgrounds," "make one color look like two different colors," etc) next time i go to home depot.

i love color-aid, except that the nice set is more than a hundred dollars, and i'd feel bad about cutting up all those beautiful colors anyway.

this is where home depot comes in! they have those sumptuous FREE paint chips in splendid array all over the walls of the paint section, and since they're actually painted, not just printed on a printer or something, they are a wonderful substitute for color-aid, i think. 

i went around the paint chip section, first pulling down the colors that were most appealing to me (i love periwinkle blue and ocean blue, dark teal, cadmium red, etc) and then pulling down colors that i found grotesque but worthy (olive green, ballerina pink, etc) and i fanned them out and looked for any weak spots. there aren't too many really bright yellows on the market, but i found a eye-piercing chartreuse that filled in that gap.

i came home and cut off all the written-on parts, resulting in lots of pieces of pure color in many different sizes.

huuuughghhghghghghghgh

i tried a lot of different arrangements. i planned to keep all the pieces as rectangles, but i didn't like the overlapping-shingle look. they were beautiful laid out in a tidy spectrum, but on a rectangle of paper, i couldn't find a pleasing order. i just wanted to keep all the potential of rainbow there...you know how a palette often ends up more beautiful than the painting it was supposed to be in service of?

get on me, beauteous color assortment

so i hit on the idea of cutting the rectangles into squares, and then cutting the squares into 45-45-90 little triangles. that way i could pair them off and be a little more organized about it, matching color to color, like a puzzle, till i was satisfied.

the finished thing ended up with some rainbow on the side and then lots of triangles. i was inspired by these absurdly beautiful children's blocks. yes, color rally! that is exactly how i want to feel!

here's the final result, slightly skewed in front of an old monoprint.

and one last note if you want to pursue the freewheeling joys of a color collage yourself: i found my super glue was more helpful than my glue stick for keeping down the cardstock-thick color samples.