Challenge of Color – beadrecipes

Erin Prais-Hintz always runs the coolest challenges, guaranteed to stretch us all as jewellery designers. And this year’s Challenge of Color, the fourth she has held, is no exception. Last year, Erin and her colour guru friend Brandi Hussey provided participants with colour palettes drawn from satellite images of Earth, but this year, we were sent to the fabulous website COLOURlovers to find, or create, our own.

COLOURlovers is a website that lets you create and name colours, palettes and even patterns made using the cool colour palettes you create. With thousands of users, inspiration is a click away.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Challenge without a challenge, right? Erin’s extra twist involved using the names of the colours to create a poem of sorts, using the names of each colour in a game called wordlinks.

From the wordlink instructions…

“with wordlink palettes you start with a two-word (or more) colour name. the next colour name has to start with the last word of the colour before it. each colour continues this way to the end. try to make the last word of the last colour the first word of the first colour. this is really hard, though.”

Sounds like fun, but it’s harder than you’d think! I created two palettes using the Wordlinks game. My first one is called Shimmer Song:

As the sky shimmers
Shimmer of magic
Magic of starlight
Starlight song
Song of the sky

As this was a muted colour palette, I thought I would make another in brighter colours. This one is called Pool Party Summer:

Summer at the pool
Pool party
Party people
People laughing
Summer of laughs.

I even used the second palette to make a pattern, Summer in the Pool, in keeping with its theme:

Pool Party Summer was the palette I eventually went with, using some wonderfully aquatic lampwork beads made by Vivian Houser at Dragyn’s Fyre Designs (these were some of the first artisan-made lampwork beads I ever bought), knotted onto deep plum waxed linen, along with a large amazonite nugget, dyed fire agate and Czech glass, a pewter mermaid connector from Green Girl Studios and antiqued silver-plated chain and clasp, to make a necklace. It’s a rare foray for me into an asymmetrical design. The matching earrings feature the lampwork beads and a few seed beads knotted onto lavender waxed linen.

Thanks again for another stimulating challenge Miss Erin, it’s always fun! And make sure you visit the other participants in the blog hop (as InLinkz doesn’t work very well on WordPress-hosted websites, you’ll need to visit Erin’s blog to see the full list of participants).

Well, today is reveal day for Erin Prais-Hintz’s 3rd Annual Challenge of Color. I have to admit I am late posting this, although it is still November 30 in the USA (phew!). It’s not that I hadn’t finished my piece, but the end of the year is in full swing around here and this week alone I have had my daughter’s piano concert, a school assembly performance, Christmas shopping, extreme heat, work, after school activities and, well, you get the picture.

Enough with the whinging and lame excuses and on to the challenge! Erin teamed up with Brandi Hussey, a jewellery designer turned colour guru, who created 40 palettes based on images from the Earth as Art series of satellite images. From Erin’s original blog post about the challenge:

The Earth As Art image gallery is a group of over 120 pictures taken from the Landsat series of Earth observation satellites since 1972. These pictures of the unique features of our beautiful planet are a vital resource for understanding scientific issues related to land use and natural resources. Plus they are just so darned cool!

All the images that we will be using in this Challenge of Color and all the information that I found came from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) which donated all these images to the Library of Congress.

The images in these galleries are spectacular. The views of mountains, valleys, islands and forests was well as agricultural patterns and even heavily populated areas are quite striking in their abstraction. The colors are much different than what you might expect. The satellite land imagery uses a digital palette that relates to the different levels on the infrared spectrum and help to give insight into the specific geography of the image.

Erin selected two palettes for each of us from the set of 40 that Brandi created. No two participants got the same pair of palettes, and we only had to use one of them. My two palettes were gorgeous:

I was intrigued and challenged by the predominance of earthy red colours in both palettes—they are not colours I gravitate toward as a rule. I looked through my bead stash and found beads that matched both palettes, which I pulled aside. I had ideas for both, but unfortunately was only able to complete the piece for the first palette—but I will complete the second piece when I have some breathing space and post it in the next few weeks.

So, that first palette. It’s a satellite image of a small African country, Guinea-Bissau, taken on 1 December 2000. The image shows complex swirling patterns in the blue of the ocean surrounding it, which are caused by the deposition of silt from the rivers you can see carving their way through the landscape. From Wikipedia, I learned this about Guinea-Bissau:

Guinea-Bissau, officially the Republic of Guinea-Bissau, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Senegal to the north and Guinea to the south and east, with the Atlantic Ocean to its west. It covers 36,125 km² (nearly 14,000 sq mi) with an estimated population of 1,600,000.

Guinea-Bissau was once part of the kingdom of Gabu, as well as part of the Mali Empire. Parts of this kingdom persisted until the 18th century, while a few others were part of the Portuguese Empire since the 16th century. It then became the Portuguese colony of Portuguese Guinea in the 19th century. Upon independence, declared in 1973 and recognised in 1974, the name of its capital, Bissau, was added to the country’s name to prevent confusion with the bordering Republic of Guinea. Guinea-Bissau has a history of political instability since gaining independence and no elected president has successfully served a full five-year term.

Only 14% of the population speaks the official language, Portuguese. A plurality of the population (44%) speaks Kriol, a Portuguese-based creole language, and the remainder speak native African languages. The main religions are African traditional religions and Islam, and there is a Christian (mostly Catholic) minority.

The country’s per-capita gross domestic product is one of the lowest in the world.

This small, tropical country lies at a low altitude; its highest point is 300 metres (984 ft). The interior is savanna, and the coastline is plain with swamps of Guinean mangroves. Its monsoon-like rainy season alternates with periods of hot, dry harmattan winds blowing from the Sahara. The Bijagos Archipelago extends out to sea.

The thing that struck me most about the image is the contrast of the vivid blue of the ocean with the red tones of the land. Interestingly, the red areas indicate dense vegetation, one of the quirks of the satellite images, which undergo complex processing to combine data collected across the electromagnetic spectrum (you can find an explanation of how these images are constructed on Erin’s blog post, linked above).

So those contrasts are what I tried to capture in my African Coast necklace, which uses copper chain and findings, combined with some Czech glass beads in an autumnal blend of lighter and deeper reds, as well as cobalt blues. I wove a blue silk fairy ribbon through the chain to highlight the vivid blues of the ocean. Sadly, I couldn’t find an art bead in my stash that had the right colours, so this time around I have not used one.

As I said above, I have plans to make a piece based on the second palette too. I have a set of crazy lace agate beads that not only contain the earthy mix of orangey-browns but the pattern of colour of the natural stone resembles the image above.

It’s been an enjoyable challenge, and one that I wish I had had more time to work on. Thank you for the beautiful palettes Erin and Brandi, and I’m really looking forward to hopping around to see everyone’s palettes and creations. Here is a list of the participants:

Erin Prais-Hintz

Brandi Hussey