This time last year I had an instant colour crush on Dark Zircon Preciosa crystals. I’d just completed a fun collaboration with Erika Sandor and the Beading School team. We put together a gorgeous box of beady treasure called ‘Winter Tale’ and I created several designs to go with it. You can find the tutorials here. With links to all the materials which are available on the BeadingSchool website too.
That particular colour love began for me when I found a vintage (1920’s?) feather decoration, in gorgeous shades from darkest teal to sea green. It has been sitting on a shelf in my studio quietly influencing me ever since. Shades of Peacock feels like a lovely antidote to all the festive red and green, bit like a lemon sorbet after a heavy lunch. Here is a picture of my window sill in July, showing that this colour crush is a keeper. It’s also a rich and abundant mix to start the new year.
Monochrome is taking one colour in many shades, like a black and white or a sepia photograph. Colour is mercurial, in that it can change appearance with what surrounds it, and going entirely monochrome with beads brings into play the textures, finishes and light reflections.
Here is how I begin working with a limited colour palette. Take a photo of the components you want to work with, in this example Dark Zircon and Dark Emerald Preciosa stones in gold settings; because a flattened image will make it much easier to see and interpret the colours within the light reflection.
I use these to pick out the colours of seed beads to add to the mix.
Because of the metal settings surrounding the crystals, I already have an accent colour of gold, and the photo shows the highlights on the Gold as a brighter, paler shade.
I added a metallic Dark Steel and a metallic Olivine, they make a nice ‘bridge’ between the colour and the Gold metallic.
My bead mix has matt, opaque and translucent lustre beads in shades of Teal, which I can work with in sizes 11 and 15 .The accent beads are Emerald round facet crystals and pearlescent Peacock Green pearls. I’ve strayed from monochrome with one ‘kick’ colour. Kaffe Fassett talks in his colour lectures about the value of kick colours, and at college we were taught to add them. A kick colour is a subtle addition of a seemingly random colour, used sparingly, that ‘kicks’ life into the colours it sits with. For this mix I’ve added a subtle Rose Gold lustre, it has a warm Purple mix. For colour theory geeks, if you look at the colour wheel, it is an Analogous colour to the Blue Green. Analogous being the three or four colours that are adjacent to each other on the colour wheel.
As a back up I also have this in a 3mm Firepolish crystal, crystal Bronze Vega which is a similar shade of Purple.
I’ll be using these beads to re-work some of the samples, and, hopefully, create a new design for the future.
