![]() ![]() When my daughter was a little girl, she would freak out whenever a butterfly flew by her or landed near her. For more info and to see her work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram.So, I wonder, why on earth would people be so afraid of butterflies? Do they believe that instead of sucking nectar out of a flower that it will suck the blood out of their body? Do they have nightmares about being attacked by swarms of bloodthirsty butterflies? What are the colors around you telling you about the world you live in? What do the colors you gravitate toward say about you?Īmina Harper is an artist, writer, and educator based in the Twin Cities. But as a reflection of this I want you, dear Reader, to symbol hunt for colors in the creative content you take in. It is the opening of the color rabbit hole that we’re all going down together. Hopefully, the tools I present in this series can heal some of the colonial conditioning we’re accustomed to art is meant to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed, after all.įor now, this is an introduction to something that will grow larger as we continue. Subjects like race, gender, and sexuality will feature prominently and I want you to keep these ideas in mind for later. Once you know what the rules are, you can break them entirely in favor of a new narrative that allows for more nuance and interrogation of larger, more impactful social structures. I will get into the binary and exclusionary language surrounding color and its usage in later installments of this series as it is important to examine these toxic views in order to shed them. This is a problem because black and white specifically are terms often associated with people, and as we all know that when you privilege one kind of person over another, the consequences are catastrophic. In western language especially, we tend to define one object via its proximity to and cultural privilege over another. This is where the stakes heighten drastically. And that’s because black and white are associated with binary thought, which is a violent hierarchy in which one of two terms or ideas dominates and oppresses the other in an attempt to destroy the natural fluidity of human identity. Now, you may notice I didn’t mention the colors black and white in this list. This kind of symbolism makes its way into just about every form of cultural content, from the gold and yellow of wealth and death in The Great Gatsby, to the character color coding in 2018's Black Panther (more on that soon). ![]() These are framing devices that give context to how color is often used in the world around us. Having a basic understanding of color as a symbol is a great way to start this exploration. If you can control the color palette of an image, you have an incredible amount of power over your audience's reaction to that image. They make us hungry, turn us on, jog our memories and can even be linked to trauma. It’s important to note that colors don’t just make things prettier they affect our mind and bodies. ![]() You have to know what feelings you want this image to get across because colors are about feelings. There are monochrome color palettes (where a specific color and its variants are chosen), complimentary color palettes (where two opposing colors and their variants are the core of the palette), and even palettes where you throw all the colors at the canvas to create a beautifully balanced technicolor acid trip that makes you want to taste the fucking rainbow.īut before you can play around in any of that. I’m always looking at color, not just in my everyday life, but I make it a point to seek out opportunities to absorb everything from jeweled and highly saturated tones, to milky and muted hues. But in order to make a decision regarding what colors to choose, one has to see a wide variety of colors applied diversely, so that the options are made known.īasically, the more color you take in, the more you can produce (or reproduce) when making art. Because there are as many colors as the world is old, this is quite the task to take on. And the truth is, I don’t select a color palette but a range of emotions I want the image to evoke I select the colors based off of that. When asked about my artwork, the first question that comes up is how I select my color palette. This is not a hidden talent or a humble brag, I’m just telling you how it is: I have kaleidoscope eyes. I can mix you any pigment you want with a basic description, I can see a color and replicate it without second thought, I can arrange a color story and place colors in descending order from lightest to darkest, warmest to coolest, hottest red to iciest indigo. I can’t say that I love it more than the average person, but I can tell you that my “superpower” is to see the difference between two seemingly similar hues that have a single degree of temperature between them. ![]()
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