Pistachio and Dark Chocolate - #the100dayproject 11-17

A pairing of pistachio and dark chocolate sounds like a delicious and indulgent late night snack, but when your add donkey grey and taupe , the first impression of the four colour combination appears rather lacklustre. I've always thought of taupe as dull and bland. Some research suggests that taupe is now a very popular colour in interior design and is considered to be associated with luxury and sophistication! I can see that it fits rather well between the donkey grey and dark chocolate as an intermediate shade.

If you haven't been following, I am currently attempting the global #the100dayproject, which means I spend a short amount of time on a daily art practice of my choice. I have chosen to interpret the colour prompts published each week by Este Macleod. I admit this one did not really excite me at the beginning , so I did a quick collage from paper torn from magazine pages. This helped me to see the different values of the colours and how they looked together.

After the first day, I started to find some old eco dyed khadi paper I had in my stash which seemed to match the greys/taupe/brown hues. it seemed rather obvious to continue the theme and create some small "nature" studies, with paper and cloth - and before I knew it, I had created a series of small series of works while growing more and more engaged in this "earthy" colour palette. The mono prints of seed pods/gumnuts were on the beautiful lotka paper and already were a lovely highlight too, for each of the day's work.

When I had used all the monoprints I had of seed pods for Days 12-14 , I used a piece of fabric with dark chocolate flowers with a couched outline and this was highlighted in the next three (Days 15-17) . The backgrounds on the eco dyed khadi paper were scraps of fabric, which were in the right tones for these colour prompts, and somehow they came together very quickly with some minimal machine stitched motifs and hand stitching the elements to the backgrounds. This week's colour prompts are now embedded in my repertoire - to be returned to, at a later date.

Watch this space for more about #the100dayproject2024

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Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

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