The photo of the parrot tulip was on a calendar that came free with Gardener's World magazine, December 2009. I particularly liked the rich colours in the petals and decided to investigate some of these colours by creating a grid in Photoshop. This was something we had to do during my Art course at College and I like to keep practising so that I don't forget the steps involved. I was curious to see what colours it would find in the tulip itself, not the background. Some of them were very surprising! I could identify the blue bloom (as on a purple grape) and the plums and purples are obvious, but the pale greens? However, all these colours are in the image, along with many others in the peach colour range. As the ink dropper tool picks just one individual pixel in the image and finds that colour, the eye isn't able to distinguish that amount of detail, unless with a microscope. I really enjoy this process, because you can never tell just what colours are lurking in an image.
So, having found some interesting colours, what, you may ask, am I going to do with them? Well, I think that I shall take a cross section of the image so that it becomes more abstract, and then, using some of the colours in the grid, try and replicate this in felt. I don't know how it will work out, but it will be fascinating to try.
Here is the result of my colour blending sample based on the colours of the Parrot tulip I featured in a previous blog post. I didn't make it with an end result in mind, it was just a blending experiment to see what colours I could create and how they would work together. I added silk threads onto the top layer and delineated the different blends using black wool. I am really encouraged by the piece and the next stage will be to create an abstract piece, using these shades (assuming I can create them again, of course!)
