News, Muse & Inspiration 6: Collecting the colours

I have to agree with this quote from Wassily Kandinsky

"Color is a power which directly influences the soul"

I have been obsessed with colour for as long as I can remember. I love coloured pens, paints, and papers. I love room interiors with colourful fabrics and accessories. I love the colours of the plants that I grow in my garden and allotment. And in the last few weeks I have decided to start collecting all of these colours and colour combinations to use in my art practice.

There are a number of digital tools that you can use to capture colours. These colours come from the things that I see as I go about my life: plants, fruit, buildings, scenes - anything that is made of colours that I love. I have been using the Swatches app to sample colours from photos that I have taken on my phone. I have created a new Instagram account where I post colours daily. You can find my growing collection of colours on Instagram at @colourcolourcollection.

I save these colours into the Adobe Creative Cloud so that they can be used with Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator - and more recently, Fresco.

Adobe Fresco is a digital painting app that I use on my laptop and also on my phone. It has come in very handy during the recent heatwaves, when using real paint was difficult (and it was just too hot to be in the studio). I have been able to continue making sketches using the colours sampled from the things that I see. These sketches satisfy my need to create and they provide opportunities to try out ideas that I can use in my mixed media paintings. To see the sketches, visit my Instagram account @suepickering_artist.

As the weather gets cooler I will be spending more time back in the studio, and once I have checked that my paints haven't all gone solid in the heat, I will be back to working on paper, canvas and board. However, I think that I will continue to explore the possibilities offered by digital apps - to collect colours, shapes, textures and interesting views. As I move around my world, I may not always have pens and paper with me, but I will usually have my phone. And that means that I have everything I need to make some interesting art!