Gaudi Colours

I am busy working on the project I will teach at my "Inspired by Gaudi" beading retreat in September 2011.

When deciding on a theme for the retreat Gaudi seemed an obvious choice because of the geometry of his work and his use of mosaic and colour.

I have decided to bead a geometric pendant which can be opened.

My colour inspiration came from this photo and I decided to use a strong orange (which was shiny) a blue (also shiny), black (once again, shiny) and yellow (yep, you guess it, shiny).

Now, I know from experience that too much shiny is not good for a project so I added in a matte orange to try and counteract all the shine.


Here you can see my first attempt using these colours:



Not good!
As I thought, all the shiny beads meant that the pattern and different colours were lost in the mix.

So next I moved onto using much more of the matte orange beads:



This was much more successful
This time at least you could see the structure and pattern much better and I was happier.

However, I felt that the colours looked a bit "muddy" and none of them stood out and "zinged" as I felt the colours did in the photo.

So I decided to add in white (more of a creamy-white as I felt white would be too hard):


I love this!


I think the oranges, yellow and blue stand out much more- even though there's far less of them.
It's amazing how the simple addition of another colour can completely alter the look of a piece.