Do you remember when you first learned about colors? I can’t be for sure, but I must have learned “my colors” from my father as he painted tiny little faces on his fishing lures. We would sit at our dining table for hours as he secured each small metal lure in a mini-clipped vice and then delicately created “alluring tiny faces” to attract the biggest of fish in the lake. I remember his determination at painting perfect little yellow circles within larger black or red circles for the eyes. Now, I’m wondering just how many different cans of specific colored paints he had to use. Did he mix colors to create others? Did he have any idea about primary, secondary, tertiary, and complementary colors? These questions will never be answered, only pondered by an artist daughter of an artist father….
This past weekend I had the privilege of watching a four year old boy explore his private world of colors. He decorated about twenty cupcakes for his father’s birthday party in our home. His mother dutifully topped each cake with a swathe of chocolate icing and then passed each little cake to her young son for “the true decorating experience”. I was in charge of the candles, so, we were an assembly line, per se. Our team’s youngest pastry chef had four tubes of colored icing: yellow, blue, green, & red and a container of multiple sprinkles in the various shapes of circles, hearts, stars, butterflies, etc. I must say, I was enthralled by his determination to make each cupcake different. No two were alike. He drew lines and circles and dots or combos of all three. He used two tubes at a time and made what could have been personal Rorschach tests since he described all kinds of intense imagery for each. His choices were based on his own color combo preferences but also his desire to please others. He asked his mother and I our preferred icing colors and sprinkle styles and then eagerly decorated our cakes just as we asked. He delighted in pleasing our requests. And then he thought of his father, “What colors would daddy like?” He was so determined to please his dad for his birthday. He exclaimed with total unbridled joy, “He will be so excited when he sees these!” Next, he described a little girlfriend’s favorite choices of colors. “Maddie likes pink! I’ll use pink sprinkles for her.” (Maddie wasn’t even there, but he included her in this color play activity). Once again, I was impressed with this ability to think of others while creating. I try to do the same thing when I’m working on a commissioned portrait or landscape. What is their favorite color and what colors do they have in their home? It’s funny how artists don’t ever forget favorites either. [As an aside, the next day, this little boy continued to remind me that my favorite color was green via various objects he found in the woods. "This is green. You like green. Do you want it? You can have it." There was such generosity in his thoughts and actions! I wondered if the next time he and his mother decorated cupcakes if he would remember "Denise likes green; I'll make a green one for her!" I hoped so.] So, this special little boy’s intense color creativity made me wonder what were my own pre-school opportunities to play with so many choices of colors. The only clear images that come to mind were while dyeing Easter eggs. Now that I think of it, I remember making a lot of “very ugly“ Easter eggs. My color mixing must have been pretty raw at the time. In my painting world of today, I would say they were “muddy” and definitely not esthetically pleasing, proving I’ve learned a thing or two about color mixing. But do, I still play with colors? Do I still explore colors? A potential future blog??? What do you think of this youngster’s color skills and how did you learn your colors?
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