Helen Cook

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Developing a Night Painting

 I wanted to use the Watercolour Curious New Year’s Palette to paint a night scene to show off the dark colours that can be mixed with this palette. These darks are perfect for representing the contrast of warm insides and cool outsides.

Thinking in Palettes

 When I was learning to paint, I wanted to try out lots of different pigments to see how they worked on their own, and to see how they behaved when mixed with other colours. It’s hard to know exactly what colour a paint is going to be from looking at swatches, and especially from the colours printed in the manufaturer’s brochures or pdfs.

24 Colour Palette

 Crayons? Nope, just repurposing this old tin for a new watercolour studio palette. The tin is the perfect height to fit pans, and a bit of kneadable eraser makes up the difference in length and width.

Call for collaboration

 I’m looking for a web developer to collaborate with me on a client side browser based app that will take an uploaded image and then display the colours in the image as points in the 3D Munsell colour space. Why make this?

Transparency

 I have been thinking a lot about the idea of transparency recently. Things that are transparent are often made of thin and fragile material, and so they can be nearly invisible and overlooked. It’s rare to look directly at the pane of glass in a window.

Oyster Mushrooms

 We went out just before Christmas to a fallen oak log in a nearby patch of woods. The log has been naturally cultured with Pleurotus ostreatus, and it fruits prolifically after stresses like rain and cold. I was fascinated by the forms and patterns these mushrooms make.

New beginnings

 Welcome, new year! I feel like 2021 was a year of putting a lot of things into place, and 2022 is the year they can start to come alive. First, starting with this new site! As someone who last built websites 15 years ago, this whole process is much smoother today.


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