Summer of Color, Week 3: purple, purple, yellow

Once again I'm joining our dear hostess Kristin at Twinkle, Twinkle Like a Star.  This week's colors are purple, purple, and yellow.  I had lots of trouble with this combination, mainly because they are complimentary colors (across from each other on the color wheel), and as such can quickly turn to mud if not treated properly.

I don't have a lot of purple or yellow, so I drug out every medium in those colors I had.  I was hoping to make something where I didn't use bed sheets for a third week in a row.

I started by attempting to give my Gelli plate another chance, but you might be able to see all the problems I had.  First, my brayer wouldn't roll on the Gelli, as you can see on the far left.  However, when I offloaded the brayer to clean it on one of my used file folders, it worked fine.  It just wouldn't roll on the Gelli.  Add to that, I somehow damaged my Gelli before I had a chance to use it more than twice.

Even after I gave it a good cleaning, the circle was still on the plate.  I ran my hand over it, and the circle was sligthly raised.  I have no idea how it happened, because I've treated this plate like it was gold.  I cleaned the plate, turned it over, then added more paint.  You can see the circle must have gone all the way through the plate, because now I had two circles.

I was hoping I could work my way around the problem by using only part of the plate.  I decided to lighten the deep purple by adding a bit of buff colored translucent glaze, which would act as my third color.

That didn't work, either.

Again, I see nothing but mud, even though I allowed the purple to completely dry before I added the yellow.

I won't bore you with my two other experiments which I didn't bother photographing, none of which included painting or dyeing fabric.  I finally settled on these three colors.

I threw about 10 techniques at this piece, which took two days to complete.

I just kept adding more and more things to the wooden block until I was finally happy with the results.

I still have trouble getting the lighting right, especially since this is a color challenge.

I painted the back and sides of the board using the bingo dabber ink.  I colored a sheet of white scrapbook paper (12" X 12") with the paint on the right of the assembly and the bingo dabber color on the left.  There was a LOT of difference in colors when I checked them on a used file folder, but not much color variation when I applied them to the scrapbook paper.  One thing I was happy about was the color of the wood.  The wood grain showed through the ink and showed up best in the outdoor shots I took.  The purple color differences are also most obvious in those two shots.

I colored a doily using the yellow paint, then added the clock hands.  I was sure I was going to have to dye a button, but finally found one (albeit a bit too large) that was purple.

Silk sunflowers, lilies, white flowers I dyed lavender, and some genuine lavender from my garden made up the bouquet.  Bits of lace were used as filler, where I would normally add leaves. 

I bought this board on a clearance rack at Home Depot (a US big box home improvement store).  It was originally 8 ft long, but I cut it in approximately 12" lengths.  I say approximate, because the saw blade removes about 1/8" with each cut.  This board was damaged in that it had not been planed properly, so there was a rough "bump" on one side.  I hid that problem by first dyeing the side, then later adding a piece of yellow and white ribbon I ran the bingo dabber over before attaching it.

I used the bingo dabber ink to color the large lace purple and used the paint to color the small lace yellow.

I had purple wire and beads, but no yellow beads.

I made a few using yellow polymer clay I decorated using two Sculpey rollers.

I am so glad this latest color challenge is finished.  This is probably the truest representation of the color combination.  I hope you like it.   If nothing else, it smells fantastic!

I was able to visit all 119 entries that were available by the deadline last week and saw some amazing art.  However, as I have mentioned in the past, I am unable to leave comments if you posted on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr, Pinterest, and some Goggle + blogs, since I'm not a member of any of those social media sites.  I was even unable to view several Facebook entries because they were hidden.  But, I certainly appreciate those of you who dropped by and I hope you enjoy this entry as much as you seem to have last week's.