This weekend I was visiting my cousin and her husband (and 2 dogs) in Ann Arbor, MI and so enjoyed the town, shops, food and music concert we saw. It must have opened up my creative vents because Sunday morning, I woke up with the color scheme for my 40th birthday party decided. This has been something I've been struggling with because since I do "colors" for a living, I wanted it to be really exciting and fresh. I also wanted to still like the colors when the party arrives--I may love one combination now, but will I have "moved on" by the time the party comes around and feel stuck? I knew I had to include powerful and bright colors because I always like those. I had to be able to have some flexibility within the scheme since I like so many colors and would want to include them. AND I had to come up with something that wasn't "an all over the place" visual mess. It's tough when you like so many things because you want to have them all in one place! I'm using the 80%/20% rule of color success with this scheme. I consider the tones of pinks and reds to be one color. Here is the final result:
I'll elaborate on the inspiration story further and tell you about the "seed" that started it all. Several months ago, I mentioned an etsy store called
All The Luck In The World. I couldn't get this photo out of my mind's eye! I love the fresh white background for simplicity accented with bright clusters of color. Since my venue "Gather"
(pics here) is mostly white with touches of turquoise, orange and green in the art installations I thought this would be the perfect time to use this image for my inspiration. Here it is again, enlarged to show detail:
The funny thing is that in my mind's memory, there was a lot more of the bright pink and tomato red in the vases. The Margot Version of this photo is what spurred on my color inspiration for the event. I was
hoping to be "efficient" and find just the right proportions of color in a beautiful photo on line, but of course I didn't. Unaffected by the huge work load on my plate today, I set about creating my own color inspiration photo (the Universe was not going to let me be lazy today!) and gathered anything in my studio that had the colors I needed. Since the weather is a dreary freezing rain, I had not enough natural light coming into my house where I originally set up the shoot. A more stable person would just pack everything into a box and work on it another day since there was light but
not me! Freezing rain be damned, I packed everything up and arranged my shoot outside. Personal sacrifice aside, I'm pleased with how I captured the colors and the tone of the event. Note that I added some papers with patterns, a little bit of sparkle in the bird and the textures of white. This will give me some fun elements to use when creating my festive atmosphere at the party. I didn't bring in the soft aquas and turquoise that you see in the vases above since the art installations will do that already. I'll leave those as my touch of odd color to shake things up at the event.
Here are a few more detail shots to flesh out the details of the palette.
There was another sacrifice made for the art today though, and it wasn't just a good night's sleep since I'll have to stay up late completing my neglected work. My puppy Baxter got a little too interested in the orange on my styling table and pulled the entire display over! Most sad for me was that my favorite white bowl with gold filagree trim broke in half. Boo! :o( Serves me right. There's Baxter absconding the roll of paper that fell out...
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