After I posted last night, I was reading some more of Masopust’s book Color and Composition…
One of the exercises towards the end is an exercise at looking at colors schemes in nature. The idea is to take a picture of a flower or an animal and analyze the colors in the picture. They have you actually snip strips of fabric in the proportions the color can be seen in the picture — fuse the strips to a 3×5 index card and you have a valuable reference for the future if you are looking for ideas. In addition to nature, they suggest looking at magazine ads.
This reminded me of an idea that I had seen in a quilting magazine awhile back. The idea was to look at product packaging and pull fabrics that match the colors on the box of the product. They used a specific product in the magazine, but I’m not going to tell you which one it was just yet.
First, I’m going to show you a picture of the color scheme as I interpreted it from my stash.
Can you guess what the product is that this scheme is borrowed from? Think about it for a minute and then click on the link that will take you to the rest of the article.
When I pulled the fabric, I knew what the color scheme was. I then went to my pantry to take a picture of the box and then look at what other color schemes existed in my pantry.
I was stunned to see how many of the products in my pantry use this same exact color scheme. One of these throws in some green, and the proportions of the colors are different but look:
Can you guess which one was my original inspiration? If you guessed the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, give yourself 5 points!
With all of the colors in the world, I find it fascinating that so many of these products use a color scheme based on the 3 primary colors, with some black and white thrown in for good measure.
What surprised me the most was how much YELLOW there is on the packaging in my pantry. I guess it makes sense. Yellow is cheerful and attention-getting.
Oddly enough, I had picked up a copy of the latest edition of Mark Lipinski’s Quilter’s Home magazine on Saturday — one of the articles is about picking color schemes based on color coordinated paint swatches that you can get at the hardware store. After going to bed thinking about the idea of ways to pick color schemes, it was funny to pick this magazine up this morning and read this particular article.
So, that was my little experiment for today. I found it interesting, and I hope that you, my dear reader, weren’t entirely bored!
I got 5 points! heh! =-) Re: Masopust–I never got past the blind, semi-blind, and contour drawing (it’s posted somewhere on my blog in 2006)…but it is a very cool book…one day I’ll get it out again.