Color Inspiration at AIC: Ceramics

 Went to the Art Institute Museum awhile ago and actually remembered my camera. I've loved the ceramics in the Asian wing since my long-ago ceramics class but have recently gotten into them more for the colors. Unfortunately due to my own incompetence I forgot to fix the white balance but you can pretty much figure it out. The last three are in the Middle Eastern art wing.

 This one claims to have a "pseudo-inscription." The only thing I can guess that means is that the writing means nothing. It doesn't look to say anything to me but I'm no expert. Anyway what a cool idea! I used to be, as a kid, very into gibberish writing but to just stick it on your plate seems... awesome.

 I'm obsessed with the roughly-painted blue glaze over the low-relief high-detail background.

Next up: kimonos.

1970s Indian book cover design

 I used to work in a library and was in charge of the India and Pakistan collection. Apparently, back in the Cold War, the US offered a deal to countries they were afraid would fall to Communism: give us your books (in key subjects like religion and science) and we'll give you food. I think this is how it went down; I don't have any sources but my memory. We had a collection mostly from India and Pakistan, with smaller collections from Yugoslavia and Indonesia and maybe somewhere else, mostly from the 70s. Anyway a great number of these books were pretty boring but as I had plenty of time to shelve them, I spent a lot of time looking at the interesting ones. A lot of the ones below I just liked the design of the covers. I don't know the languages involved or the subjects, but a lot of the more colorful ones look like pulp novels. (It was through this job that I also learned about weather modification, Rabindranath Tagore and Zainul Abedin). I've posted one of these covers before, but here's the whole of my photos.

 Some cool marbelized page ends

 vivid color everywhere

Sorry about the poor picture quality. These were taken with my cell phone camera on the sly!

Rainbow Shoes

So, I arrange my shoes by color. It's true, the secret's out. I've got every color but green, and I have teal sort of to replace it. My collection of high heeled shoes I rarely wear lives on an inverted drawer from a dresser that I found in the alley. I never got around to painting it, but it adds some much-needed storage. Black and brown and everyday shoes are on the bottom, along with some sewing supplies in boxes.

Geometric Wall Art Ideas

I'm really into geometric DIY wall art right now. The top image is by U look like a bunny via Design for Mankind.
This photo is from flickr photographer Graphic Surgery taken somewhere in Sweden, also via Design for Mankind.
This is the dining room of Anne-Claire Rohe, whose home was featured on Design*Sponge. She made the hot pink wire installation as a homage to Fred Sandbeck.

There's a lot more out there, Design for Mankind is also really into geometrics. REALLY into. Design Crisis will also hook you up with a lot of fun graphic wall treatments, especially huge colorful ones that involve a major paint commitment and look best with gold. For example, this cool laser light show wall paint job, which is actually pretty subtle and very cool.

Anyway I'm thinking something maybe outside on my front porch? The kitchen is also rather boring, but maybe not after we put up the long-awaited liquor shelf?

Saffron

I like the color saffron. It's so bright and yellow and rich, and one of the colors of India's flag. I doubt it would look very good with my new red hair, but I don't really care. When I read Midnight's Children, I loved the way Rushdie played with the colors saffron and green, spinning a life of a person and a nation in them.
First image is a book my parents have on their coffee table. I can't get it to rotate!
Second image from The Sartorialist (it's not exactly saffron but it's the right saturation).

I did it: Red Hair

So I actually went through with it and dyed my hair. It went from looking like this (above) to this (below).
Oh my. This is exactly one day after I henna-ed it, so it has mellowed out a good bit since then. It's now a pretty solid red. I missed a few spots, since I put it on dry hair, so I might go back when I start seeing roots and redo it a touch. Anyway, it's a big shock and rather hard to get used to, but I really like it.

Big Color Changes = Insomnia

So last night, instead of watching a movie, I painted my new room in my apartment green. I mixed together a bunch of old green paint with some really light blue-ish green and Jess helped me get it all on the walls, so yay! that's done now. I'm going to try to move some of the big stuff tomorrow when I have the assistance of a friend and a car.

While I did that, I also dyed my hair with henna. It's not dry yet, and it's supposed to darken over time, but right now I look like the chick from the Fifth Element (that Bruce Willis science fiction movie?) and I am kindof freaking out. Much like the chick from the Fifth Element was when she woke up dressed only in like masking tape in a weird glass coffin. Whew, at least I'm in my own bed.

Alls that to say, I can't sleep, either from freaking out about my hair or the coffee I drunk at 10:30 in order to force myself to go back and finish the paint job (lesson learned). Also if you were in my neighborhood around 10:30 you might have seen me walking or biking around with a plastic bag on my head and covered in paint, not a pretty sight!

Banners and Pennants

Banners and pendants have been a trendy trend for awhile now on the internets, but they've been looking good around the world for much longer than that.
First image from Cherry Blossom Girl, taken in Yangshuo, China. Now I really want to go there!

This one is cute and simple. From twoandsix, via The Sweetest Occasion, via Oh So Beautiful Paper. Reminds me of a blog post I read a LONG time ago of valentine hearts made by a scientist of old journals and strung around her house. Here they are!
By Heart of Light via East Side Bride (a totally acceptable wedding blog that isn't really a wedding blog really). They're made of her old science journals!
These are from housemartin, via Snippet & Ink (I am over wedding blogs but still find a lot of cute ideas for home and parties).
by Oliver Yaphne, via Minor Details, via Swissmiss. I think we're supposed to be seeing the rug, but all I see are those fantastic pennants along the wall. And the nice big window.

Oh, Hello, friend had the idea to tie together vintage hankerchiefs to make a banner. I have scores of old handkerchiefs, and am so committed to them that today I sewed together a couple that had ripped. On one, the simple flower embroidery was apparently left unfinished-- forced into nose-blowing service by my impatient mother, perhaps?

Garlands are so all over everywhere (Modish, Confetti System, and on and on) that I am getting exhausted posting examples. No one really cares that much about little pieces of paper attached to string, least of all me.

The point is THIS picture:
I took that in Maadi in Cairo in 2007. Those Egyptians really got it right! Their pennants are made of cut-up colorful plastic bags, and they just leave them up in the street all the time. I love how you can see them disappearing around that winding alley corner, and above your head all bleached out by my over-exposed picture. You can deal with my poor photography skills, though, because of my enthusiasm for how cool Egypt is. This was part of the back-roads route that I walked when I went to teach English. You duck into this little labyrinthe after a harrowing walk past a school that just let out a mob of totally insane children, donkeys eating the grass that cushioned the fruit on the cart they pulled all day, a concrete box of a mosque draped in brilliantly-patterned tenting fabric and glowing green for funerals and services. Juice bars, dusty streets, guys selling bad "African" jewelry pinned to faded felt boards, graffiti, Coca-Cola, carrying white boards and chains to keep the chairs from being stolen.

Colorful, Imperfect Curtains

Recently I saw a slew of images of curtains that really appeal to me: the random colors, especially the dip-dye look in some of the first few pictures, streamers, different lengths and colors, mixed with a good dose of sheers, letting in tons of light. Maybe I'll hang some of my scarves as a window treatment.

They seem appropriate for the kind of apartment that we have around here, and that I got: rambly 1930s flats with lovely architectural details, covered up by scores of coats of white paint, inhabited by students, artists, hipsters, professors, programmers, and researchers for years and years and years. Nothing is quite new or perfect, neither is it quite old enough to be architecturally valuable, but it has its own charm, and I like it a lot.

Photos 1-4 by Hotze Eisma via Bliss.
Photo 5 from Intelligent Clashing via Even*Cleveland.
Photo 6 by "Alice" on Pia Jane Bijkerk.

Color Fun

Check out some more color fun:

• Flickr images sorted by color at Multicolor Search Lab
• This article from Design*Sponge about Color Theory
• Favela Project from Kitsune Noir, painting a run-down neighborhood in brights
• Similarly, the Let's Colour Project, which attempts to the do same thing, world-wide (video above)
• Since I have a compulsive need to cross-reference, Black*Eiffle also has a post about the Let's Colour Project (we're being international here, so there's a "u")

While in the video the project looks awesome, beautiful, uplifting, etc, I wonder, is it sponsored by a paint company? Also, I can't help but feel disquieted by the scene painting the havelis (I think. I saw some courtyards and balconies and almost mashrabiya-like carvings that looked to me to be Rajasthani, but I really don't know). Sometimes bleached-out old stone and wood is what is most beautiful. Some things are built to NOT look technicolor, but to be peaceful in their uniformity of color. See the photos below, which I took in Cairo (first one in 2007 from my apartment window, second in 2005 from Al-Azhar park), for example. Cairo can be awfully bland (from far-off only) because it has so many thousands of plain grey-tan concrete Soviet-looking apartment blocks, all covered in reddish desert/pollution dust, but it has a special monochrome austerity that I love.

Color Palettes

Uh oh. I just stumbled down an internet rabbit hole into a world of color!

It started by a memory of this Camp Comfort post about Wear Palettes, a blog of color palettes taken from street style (and other) photographs. Like this one, cute, right?
While I was looking for that, I found this cool website Color Hunter that creates custom color palettes from your images for you. Unfortunately, it doesn't catch smaller patches of colors, even if they're a big deal in the outfit. For example, in this one below, where's the red from the shorts? What about the bright blue in the towel?
This next one is from a painting by Egon Schiele, called The Artist's Wife. Where's her green shirt? And the red hair came out kinda brown.Anyway, this post from Style Bubble clued me in to using Paint to pull out the colors. I guess everything isn't automatic. It also has some nice examples from Wear Palettes, I particularly like the dark rich plaid palettes. Plus, it sent me to Colour Lovers, a community of palettes, color trends, interactive graphs (!!!), and other joyous color fun. I'm definitely going to check it out further.
I made this on Paint just now. See how much better my color palette is than the automatically generated one? So much better.

Memries...

I was reading on academichic about memento clothes: items that belonged to relatives and/or have special personal significance.

I tend to really hold on to stuff, so I have a lot of these items. The shirt in the picture above gets lots of compliments. My dad bought it for my mom when he was a graduate student back in the mid-80s. I loved my mom's old clothes so much that I was convinced that if I had children, they would like my stuff and so I should hold on to them. To that effect I have been wearing down my favorite cross-country t-shirt since I got in 7th grade. I think my brother has it (along with most of my t-shirts) now. I gave them to him with the express command that he not lose them, and I think for awhile he wore almost exclusively Chapin girls cross-country shirts. Sometimes I feel emotionally attached to things that went on long epic trips with me, or that I've had for a really long time. My mom gave me this shoulder bag in high school, and I carried my school books in it into college. I had to sew it up time and again, but even now, when I carry its ratty goodness around, I feel close to my mom and my high school self: simple, happy, low-maintenance, a bit of a hippie. This is a terrible picture of it, I took it in my room in college when I was playing around with the features on my camera (which is now lost to an encounter with honey inside the very same bag and lots of dust in Wyoming). And, the blanket was my mother's in high school. It's on my couch right now.
This is more playing with my camera settings. I love these orange shoes! They were a 17th birthday present from my mom. I picked them out. They were $20 which seemed like a really big deal to me at the time. I really was a low-maintenance kid! (wow, I don't have half of the stuff I can see in this closet: the "stripper boots," the cleats from frisbee days, the not-waterproof boots, some polyester dresses, ew! and oh look, the sweater I got at Gap in 8th grade and STILL HAVE! I thought I was a big deal for getting something at Gap in season.)