Category: Æsthetic

(Or Color Story, for our American readers.)

Having considered our unfavourite colours earlier in the week, we now turn to a more pleasant task: choosing our favourites.

There’s no worksheet for this month, but if you pop across to the Colette page you will find a few suggestions for ways to gather your favourite colours, and ways to collate them (mostly digital, for the technically inclined).

Suggestions for bringing your favourite colours to mind include: What colours are suggested by the words you gathered in Month 2? What colours are the garments you most often wear? What colours are you drawn to in other areas of life?

There is also the matter of deciding which colours suit you, and whether you’re going to limit yourself to those or not. Myself, I use the “reflective power of colour” instead of wearing makeup, so I value having colours that look good on me. Others may prefer to just go with whatever colours they like, irrespective of the resulting aesthetics – it’s a personal choice. For those who do want to find out what colours may suit them, I’ve found this site helpful. (Shopping in natural light with a frank friend can also be useful.)

Being (as far as I can tell) a Deep Autumn, I go for warm, rich, muted colours. The aforementioned site lists 22 suggested colours, some of which are Definitely Not Me (bright yellow, lime bronze, hot turquoise…). But choosing colours which suit you shouldn’t exclude wearing colours you like – there should be a Venn diagram arrangement, with you dressing yourself out of the overlap in the middle.

So, let’s start piling up some colours! You can use fabric samples, paint chips, art supplies, scissors applied to magazines – anything you like, just pile up them colours. The more the merrier.

My pile looks like this:
dark chocolatey brown (most browns, actually)
plum
buttery yellow (not too yellow!)
the natural creamy colour of unbleached calico
all the rich reds of blood and paprika and leather book-bindings
forest green
deep rose
calm lavendery blue (it makes me feel peaceful but look ghastly)
hazel green
deep gold
aubergine
mahogany
and coppery bronze.

And what do we do with this pile of colours? We hoard them… and we wait till next month, when the raw material begins to become something more.

What’s in your pile of favourite colours?