Creativity With Colors

By Carol Woolum Roberts

On Monday I had a group of creative women come to my home for lunch and an afternoon of exploring creativity through colors.

This group was formed last September.  Five other women and myself committed to a 12 week study of making our way through Julia Cameron’s book “The Artist’s Way”.  By the time we were done, the six of us had formed a special bond, and wanted to continue meeting on a monthly basis, with the focus of exploring more of our creativity.

Shortly before we were going to meet on Monday, one of the group members texted and was unable to come.  There is always a hole in our group when someone misses.

A week before our gathering I had given the group this assignment:

To prepare for our get together, I would like you to choose a color to focus on for the next week.

If possible, starting tomorrow, collect an observation of that color that lands in your field of vision: what appears at your feet, in a bush, above you, behind you or anywhere else your eye is taken.  Try and do this every day, and take at least one photo every day.  But if you don't take one every day, it is okay.  

Keep your curiosity alive and try to notice all the hues you can see of one color in one object.

Document your finds using your phone camera to take photos of the things you see. 

Try and take at least seven different photos, but you can have more if you would like. The important thing is they are focused on the same color. 

Bring your phone with the photos on the 22nd, and we will do a Creativity Project using the photos.

After eating a delicious, colorful lunch with contributions from everyone, we took a tour of our Grow Me A Story Garden, again enjoying the many colors and textures one sees in the various areas of the garden.

After the garden tour, we started talking about what color we chose, and nobody chose the same color.  We had white, blue, green, orange and red.  We all brought our phones out and shared some of our favorite photos from the week, and why we liked them.

Sometimes we do a piece of writing based on a writing prompt.  Since the theme was color, I decided to take the word “lavender” and find six quotes that had the word lavender in them.  I then gave each of the women the quote I thought went best with who they were.  Each quote fit them very well. After they received their quotes, I set the timer, and we each had ten minutes to write something based on the quote they received.

Here are the quotes:

We lavender folk spray up, spontaneously flowering in the color we had learned as an identifying mark of our culture when it was subterranean and secret.  Judy Grahn

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(The raindrops) played across the coast all through the night, until the soft new day shrugged itself awake, tried on amethyst and lavender for a while, and finally decided on pale yellow.  Gary D. Schmidt

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It always seems to me as if the lavender was a little woman in green dress, with a lavender bonnet and a white kerchief.  She's one of those strong, sweet, wholesome people, who always rest you, and her sweetness lingers long after she goes away.  Myrtle Reed 

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When hope is fleeting, stop for a moment and visualize, in a sky of silver, the crescent of a lavender moon.  Imagine it-delicate , slim, precise, like a paper-thin slice from a cabochon jewel.  It many not be very useful, but is it beautiful.  And sometimes it is enough. Vera Nazarian 

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 Bursts of gold on lavender melting into saffron.  It's the time of day when the sky looks like it has been spray-painted by a graffiti artist.  Mia Kirshner 

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Read the following quote, and I will share with you the lovely writing that one of our group members wrote about in our writing exercise.

It was our favorite part of the day, this in-between time, and it always seemed to last longer than it should--a magic and lavender space, unpinned from the hours around it, between worlds. 

Paula McLain

How is it that time loses its constraints when you’re with someone you love?

Morning no longer bound by sunrise, nor night by the light of the moon.

Moments become part of eternity, neither the past nor the present.

They become the precious here and now, never to exist again.

Hold tight to these elusive gems— bind them up safely in your heart.

The day will come when the path back to your loved ones is to find them and unwrap them once again.

Remember the scents …

Memorize the sounds …

Etch the images in your memory …

This is how you’ll find your way home.

Feel free to take one of these quotes, set the timer for ten minutes, and write whatever you would like, and see what comes of it.  If you like what you wrote and would like to share it, send it to Paul and Carol to read.

And if you like that piece of writing I shared from one of our group, leave a comment below.  I know she would appreciate the encouragement!!

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Take some time to observe color this week.  Pick a color and take some pictures of things that are that color and share with us your experience.

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