Free class - Colouring-in your life

After a revamp of the look of this blog, I'm going to post my free scrapbook journalling classes in one place so they can be found easily. Of course, there's also inspiration, quotes and advice about journalling all through the blog (You can find some here), especially "Write it on Wednesday".

Also - if anyone has a problem with journalling and would like some help, just make a comment on any post (giving me info about your issue) and I'll reply with some help in a new post. I'm here to help you!

The first free class "Colouring-in your life" has been on the blog for a while, but here it is collected together for you.

Part 1: Thinking in Colour, Sunday 14 January
Part 2: Exploring Colour, Saturday 20 January
Part 3: Colour in Scrapbooking, Friday 2 February
Part 4: Colour me a Layout, Friday 2 February
Extra for those with Firefox browsers: Colour picker widget

Hope you enjoy the class. Please comment with a link to your LO if you have a go :)

The free classes will be collected on the right hand side, just below my slideshow :)

Colour picker

Here's an interesting widget that helps you pick co-ordinating colours - useful if designing webpages, but also good for colours of any kind!

And of course - brilliant for helping you work out the colour palette for a scrapbook page!

Only works in Firefox, I'm afraid. If you have Internet Explorer, you won't be able to see it properly.

Colouring-in your life. 4: Colour me a layout!

Colouring-in your life

This is the fourth and final in the series of journalling inspiration based on colour (see Thinking in Colour, Sunday 14 January, for the first one; Exploring Colour on Saturday 20 January for the second one, and Colour in Scrapbooking earlier today for the third one.)

4. Colour me a layout!

You have now collected some monochrome stash, and a photo or two.

On this layout, your journalling is going to be BIGGER than the photo!

Now take an appropriate pen and shade of paper and pick one or more of the following exercises. You might click with the first one you try or it may take longer, but keep trying until you have something to work with: to end up with 1 or 2 paragraphs (100-130 words).

• Why did you pick that colour for your monochrome LO?
  I picked purple because Sharon sent me purple and it’s one of my favourite colours – it’s one of the colours in Basic Grey Fusion that I like so much. I had a purple bedroom when I was a teenager ….etc.
  
• What does that colour mean to you?
  Purple is a royal colour, very sophisticated in the seventies. Mary Quant and the hip generation.
  
• What else do you have that is that colour?
  I have a pink dressing gown, it’s fleecy, comfortable and warm, but was given to me by my mum so it isn’t really mine… I wish my dressing gown was my own choice…
  
• Find an object that is that colour and handle it – what does it feel like? What texture is your colour?
  The vase is blue – it feels smooth and cold. I didn’t like it when I got it as a wedding present but in fact when yellow and orange roses and lilies are arranged in it, it looks beautiful. And I actually like blue flowers like irises and bluebells …
  
• What has that colour meant to you in the past?
  Green reminds me of my school uniform and how I hated wearing those thick woolly tights, even though they were warm in the winter. My schoolmates used to turn over the waist of their uniform skirts to make them more of a miniskirt… (N.B. the colour green got me reminiscing about school uniform, and I developed that theme.)

· Write for 10 minutes without stopping – doesn’t matter if you write absolute rubbish, just don’t stop – starting with a colour. When you’ve finished, pick out anything meaningful and develop that theme.

Go with the flow! When you’ve got about two paragraphs go back and polish them – write it out again and improve on your wording or your spelling if you need to (or not!). End up with 100-130 words.

Practice this bit on scrap paper if you’re not sure: Pick an appropriate light coloured paper/cardstock about 5 inches wide (and as long as possible!) and collect as many pens of the relevant colour as you can (e.g., purple shades). Draw light lines in pencil if you don’t think you can stay straight. Leaving about half an inch either side, write out your piece of journalling, changing pen colour every few words, or using a special colour for special words. You’ll carry on until you’ve finished the piece, then trim the bottom edge of the journalling card to suit the size of your journalling. Ink round the outside.

You can computer generate your journalling if you like – this is about what you write rather than how you write!

Now put your LO together. You can scraplift mine, or create your own. The only rule is to make the journalling the feature.

Colouring-in your life: 3. Colour in scrapbooking

Colouring-in your life

This is the third in the series of journalling inspiration based on colour (see Thinking in Colour, Sunday 14 January, for the first one and Exploring Colour on Saturday 20 January for the second one.)

3. Colour in scrapbooking

How do you choose your LO colours?

• From the picture – pick out colours very closely related to the colours in your picture?
• Choose papers you like and then find a pic to match? Or even adjust the colours of the pic to make them fit (making them black and white because they’d otherwise clash with the paper falls into this category). Choosing to wear or even buying clothes because they match your paper also fits into this category!
• Pick the photo first, then choose papers that don’t clash with it.

Some other way?

Take a sheet of coloured paper – any colour or colours – use as many coloured pens as you have to write down as many words/phrases/sayings/quotes as you can think of/look up/collect that are related to colour.

You stop me feeling blue

Colourful language

Colouring between the lines

He led a colourful life

Rose-coloured spectacles

Why not share a few of your phrases as comments on this blog? Or capture them on your own blog - these could be titles (of blog entries or LOs!) for the future…

NEXT: go collect some stash for a monochrome LO (size of your choice).

Cardstock, patterned paper, brads, ribbons, embellishments, pens, etc. Whatever you like.

Now find a small photo or photos with toning colours or adjust one in a graphics program – preferably of yourself but it doesn’t have to be! You could - if you wish - wait until AFTER you’ve produced your journalling in step 4 before you choose a photo…

When you’ve collected your stash, move on to number 4 in this series.

Colouring-in your life: 2. Exploring colour

Colouring-in your life

This is the second in the series of journalling inspiration based on colour (see Thinking in Colour, Sunday 14 January, for the first one.)

2. Exploring colour

Jot down the answers to the following questions:

a. What colour(s) did you have at your wedding? (Bridesmaids dresses, bouquet & flowers, accessories, etc.; your outfit, if it wasn’t white)

b. If you had a party with a colour theme and a white church hall as a background, what colours would you use to decorate it – banners, tablecloths, flowers, crockery?

c. What is your favourite flower colour?

d. What colour car would you ideally like (or maybe you have it…)

Now:

e. Look up dictionary definitions of colour – eg

“a visual attribute of things that results from the light they emit or transmit or reflect; "a white color is made up of many different wavelengths of light"”

f. Colour mixing is different depending on whether you are mixing light or paint…..

Naming colours is important in naming paint, lipstick and eyeshadow, lingerie, wool, cardstock… Look at the names of the colours in the Bazzill range, for example, and jot down your favourites (names of colours rather than the colours themselves).

g. Get out your colour wheel – or print out this one - http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~psyc351/Images/ColorWheel2.jpg

Explore some interesting colour illusions
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/col_lilacChaser/index.html

Colour is important in clothing/fashion, interiors, make-up and grooming. It’s even thought to have healing properties
http://www.colourtherapyhealing.com/colour_fun/

Colour is not an property of what we are looking at – it is something created in the brain as a result of the way your eyes interpret wavelengths of light. Colour is an invention of the human brain. Without our eyes, there is no such thing as colour – so everything must be in the equivalent of greyscale. Were there aliens, colour might not be one of their senses and they might have an additional sense or completely different senses from our five…

Colouring-in your life. 1: Thinking in colour...

Colouring-in your life

Here's a journalling exercise on colour that was part of our Team Cybercrop in 2006.

Part 1: What do colours mean to you?

There’s a condition called synaesthaesia in which people have their senses mixed up – they can “see” sounds and “hear” smells, “taste” colours…

Here, for example, is my take on colour:

blue - the moment just before waking, but also the pain of pulling my hair
red - the sharpness of cooking tomatoes, and heels stumbling on cobbles
yellow - Yorkshire cheese, the sound of a ship's horn in the muggy fog
brown - mother-love, buttered mushrooms and Guinness
white - the sound of silence, nothing but the ringing pulse in my ears
black - proud and strong, the tautness of chain, a clear bell chime
midnight blue - velvet to touch and deep knowledge of a lover
green - breezes gusting, and squirrels jumping from tree to tree

Take a colour – think about what it represents – jot down a few ideas…
Write down each of the following on a separate line and complete it as I did...
Post it here as a comment if you like. (Note that comments are moderated to avoid thiose horrible people who leave comment spam so it might take a little time for your comment to appear.)

blue
red
yellow
brown
pink
white
black
green

So what does this have to do with scrapping? Aah - more soon!