Shades of Blue

 

It is winter time and its cold! Well considering I am talking about winter in Australia and I do not live in the mountains the cold is not as intense as that of Europe. I lived there for 25 years and was pretty happy with the cold. I even enjoyed it. When I went for holiday to hot places I did need to use the air conditioning for temperatures above 25C. However, since I have acquired the chronic condition of Connective Tissue Disease the body seems to have flipped a switch. Now I start shivering when the temperature goes below 20C and start looking for my winter woollies.

Well with this need to hibernate during the winter months I spend a fair amount of time talking to friends online on all sorts of topics. The other day the conversation meandered into artistic abilities. We got talking about hobbies like painting with water colours and pencil drawings which I have. My friend is a potter and is a professional, not an amateur like me. For some reason the talk turned to use of colour. I was pointing out that I am not very patient and that is a drawback when considering water colour and this was the reasons I picked up the pencil. To get the shades right I would have to wait for the paint to dry before applying more to slowly darken specific areas and this was too time consuming. I was always in a hurry to complete the painting.

Well the meandering conversation brought us to the colours we like and the varying shades of them.  I told her about an idle conversation I had about shades of green which I then wrote up for my blog. My friend said her favourite colour was blue and it prompted me to think about writing this blog about the shades of blue. She uses the blues in the decorations of her pottery which I believe has a beachy theme. I too have loved the colour blue since childhood. Most of my clothes used to have some shade of blue in them. In fact blue is also my husband’s favourite colour. We often talk of the shades of blue in the sky when travelling. When you travel to places like deserts the sky is vast. We also see vast skies when in the countryside. Travelling in Australia also we enjoy vast skies and the changing shades of blue. Along with red and yellow, blue is a primary colour that gives rise to all other colours by mixing varying levels of them. In the rainbow there are 3 shades, violet, indigo and blue at one end of the spectrum. I am particularly not going to label the shades but use examples to evoke the understanding of each shade.

One of the favourite shades of blue is what my husband calls the Simpson sky blue. It’s a soft shade of blue which is light and bright. It is seen often at the start of the day as the rosy light of the rising sun changes to blue of the day. Something I think of that clear pale blue as sharp, the connection of this blue to sharp is pretty tenuous as I think of the knife and steel that it is made from and this to the odd phrase of steel blue. However, in reality I think the blue tinge of steel is slightly darker in shade. The shades of blue are generally dependant on the level of white or black mixed into the primary colour blue. The lightest one is called periwinkle blue after the periwinkle flower which is a very pale blue colour. I would attribute the emotion of gentleness to this colour and also to baby blue. There is another term for this baby blue colour and that is powder blue. This is an English terminology and I often wonder how powder connects to the shade of blue unless in the past there was a talcum powder which had a hint of blue in it.

Then as the day gets older, the sky that is clear of clouds becomes an intense blue, a much darker and brighter shade. It feels rich and gives that cold sparkle of a winter day. While in summer it makes one think of cool breeze off the ocean. As more black gets added into this blue the darker the shade becomes moving from royal blue to navy blue to almost black. Strangely enough these used to be shades of the blue of the ink I used to buy when I was in school. While blue is supposed to be calming and is a welcome colour on a hot summer day I had to change the pale blue walls of my home in UK as it gave the room a cold feeling. The same cold feeling can also be created by blue flooring especially a carpet, as I also had a grey blue carpet. Yes, grey blue is also a soft pastel and is soothing as well. In warm countries these colours are very good to have in the house to keep the cool feeling on hot summer days.

The darker shades of blue can actually feel warmer than the lighter ones. The dark blue of the sky at night without clouds can be calming and warm. This dark sky with stars twinkling and super moon conjures up a velvety feel to the colour. This was the emotion the sky over the Negev desert evoked. The dark background also makes the stars shine bigger and brighter and seems to go on and on encompassing the small human on the surface of the desert. It is only when this star and moonlight is missing that the sky feels truly black. The other time the sky goes to the shades of navy and black is when the thunder clouds gather and sunlight gets obscured completely.

The sky is not the only thing that reflects the various shades of blue the seas also give us different blues. In fact the shades of waters in the shallows are almost transparent as seen in the coral islands and then it starts out with pale green and gets darker moving swiftly into the spectrum of blues. The dark of the deep sea is usually seen as a dramatic shift as the land levels falls off the side of an island. That dark blue can often be the shade called indigo as seen around the tropical atolls.  This spectrum is seen around the coral islands like that of the Maldives. But, like the mixing of grey into the blues of the sky, you have the mixing of greens in the blues of the seas. This green tinge into the waters makes the colour warmer than the paler blues.

The blue is also seen in so many shades in the flowers from that soft periwinkle blue to the deep almost purple of the morning glory. The bright intense blue is also the colour of copper and depending on the amount of copper in the mix the shades of the blue of gems vary. So the blues are beautiful whether alone of in a mix. They highlight the other colours and also change them when mixed.

Shades of Green

It was a hot and muggy afternoon with hardly a hint of breeze to move the hot humid air along. Having spent the morning catching up with family on Skype and doing some gardening as well as relocating the plants along the sunny side of the house we watched a movie. However the heat felt unrelenting and even the movie could not take our minds of it. Now I am very much for the heat. It does my bones and muscles a lot of good to be warm, supple and pain free. However the humidity tends to sap the energy ever so slowly. All I need is a little breeze and am happy as a hog in the mud!

So about 5 ish in the afternoon we decided to move out on to the veranda in the front of the house overlooking the garden and the road. I had suggested many a time that we should sit out and watch the world go by as the sun moves away in the afternoon and its pleasant to sit there. This time it was suggested to me that we might sit there and I sat down quickly. We got these camping chairs when we moved into this house as we had no furniture and needed somewhere to sit. The chairs are folding canvass ones with pockets to hold your drink, book and the phone so there is no real need for getting up often. So there we sat watching cars go by and an occasionally person walking or even jogging by! Waiting for that bit of breeze to begin cooling the air slowly.

So the talk of colours started from my husband’s comment that there are more white, silver or grey cars on the roads here. I guess that in hot sunny weather light colours like white, grey, silver, metallic beige etc. would reflect sunlight and stop the car getter hotter than if it was a dark colour car where heat would be absorbed by the car. Thus for the next few minutes we counted the light coloured cars and sure enough the numbers were more than double that of dark cars which were red, maroon, black and blue. My eyes were drawn to the neighbour’s garden and their beautiful tree with purple flowers. I had not seen this tree before and neither the beautiful bright purple flowers that actually can cover up the lighter green leaves.

We had seen two very big trees just on Circular Quay a couple of weeks ago and this week all these trees around my home have got beautiful purple cover. It is the Jacaranda tree and the website tells me there are 3 different coloured flowers. I started looking at the tree and thinking how would one paint this tree in water colour. I have been learning the art of drawing and painting with water colours by trial and error. I think the use of colour pencils is not within my skill mix. I just find that it is difficult to blend colours and shade colours in the way I would like. The water colours I have finally decided are more for a patient painter. You need to build up the layers and this is what will help to darken the colours where you want without it all becoming homogenous due to bleeding if the picture is still wet. I find that having to wait and build the picture is frustrating. While I do not have to finish the complete painting in one go I still like to see parts that I work on come alive.

Thus for this tree one would have to start with the background of blue sky and leave the bottom quarter white. This white would have to be filled with green trees that form the boundary of the garden across the road. I do would not go for the white railing of the garden. Then, to draw the trunk and branches of the tree. The shape reminds me a little of the broccoli head. The truck and braches form a sort of a triangle and the canopy of the leaves and flowers seem to form a triangle on top.. so we get a loosely constructed shape of diamond. The layers of brown would have to be built up to show the lighter shades and darker patches to bring out the texture of the bark and the places light falls on them. The one would have to dab in the leaves and finally the huge bunches of purple flowers.

The other strand of our conversation also lead us to this thinking about colours and painting. We had been talking randomly about the various museums we had visited and the paintings we had seen just reminiscing, that art appreciation should be counted as a meaningful conversation and I laughed that maybe I did not qualify to critique after all I only go with what I like and not any academic / artistic criteria.

So we talked about how much easier it was to blend and make up colours that were accurate to the shades we see in nature. The trees in front of us had many different shades of green. The trees in our garden (and I have yet to check out the common names) have two kinds of green. The one which has very dark brown cones, well almost black, with big flat seeds had got real dark green (hunter green) but the new leaves are a lot lighter green almost yellowish (green yellow). Believe me I am not making up the names of the shades as you can check it out on the weblink I have provided. The other tree has think long leaves and had bright red bunches of thin long flowers. Now that the flowers have died out and the seeds are all brown the green (India green)of the leaves tends to get overshadowed by the brown of the seeds.

The tree across the road has even lighter green leaves. Now we had to start comparing the depth of the greens as of course I did not have this chart of the shades of green handy! Next to it was another tree which had dark green leaves but with tinges of yellow on the margins. This made it seem like the green was covered with a thin layer of bright yellow. The effect in sunlight is that of real dark patches of green (office green) and large areas of yellowish green (lime). Now you can see there is a difference been the two shades of green I have described – lime and green-yellow. The tree behind is a pine with branches coming out from the dark brown trunk. The leaves are very dark green (Phthalo green). This from a distance at dusk looks almost black. There is another tree which has olive green leaves but also has paler look almost silvery in certain lights.

This meandering through the shades of green took us to night fall and the road lights came on. So we left the shades of brown on the trunks and branches for another day. Nature is wonderful with all the different colours and their varying shades and trying to replicate them in paintings is so difficult for a novice like me but what pleasure in trying!