Happy Bank Holiday Monday to my UK readers and hello new week to the rest of you. It’s Vive la Différence Monday and that’s always something I look forward to.
Let me introduce you to Caroline, author of Trend Daily. Caroline lives with her family in the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire and is an interiors stylist. Her blog is an on-line visual diary where she photographs her everyday thoughts and ideas.
For new readers:
The concept: each month I will invite one blogger. They will create and showcase one image/vignette. There are 20 themes and 20 objects for my guest to choose from. They choose 1 theme and up to 3 objects. I will then create an image/vignette based on their choice. Everyone has free reign on how to create the image. It can be simple photography, a drawing, a collage, a hand-painted image, a styled table top… the choice is yours! The fun part is that you, my readers, will see 2 versions inspired by the same subject matter. There is no right or wrong. There’s just ‘different’.
Caroline chose the theme: 50 shades of …. with the objects: Flowers and Colours. Here is Caroline’s Vignette.
50 shades of Decay
Hi everyone, I’m Caroline – an interiors stylist with a little visual diary blog on the side and a slight addiction to photographing nature in it’s decaying form! Looking through Tina’s list of subject choices, flowers and colour was the easy part and I thought that 50 shades of…. would encompass these two subjects nicely!
I use a lot of fresh flowers at work and bring them home whenever I can to photograph for the blog – whilst still alive and throughout the whole process of decay. I love recording the whole process with their change in form and colour into something equally as beautiful dead as it is alive.
I bought these pale lilac and pink tulips form Grey’s Court (National Trust) in Henley. The gardeners had just bunched them up for sale outside their greenhouses, where volunteers work year round tending to the beautiful walled fruit, vegetable and flower gardens. For anyone even with a passing interest in flowers, the gardens and house are a quintessentially English day out in the countryside!
My children, Evie and Gabriel studiously counted ‘at least’ 50 different shades and colours between the hyacinths and tulips – or so I’ve been ‘reliably’ told !!
How brilliant to be part of Tina’s Vive La Différence – such a great concept that I’ve enjoyed following from the beginning – thanks so much for asking me Tina! xx
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50 shades of Jelly Beans
I was looking forward to someone choosing 50 shades of….. you must understand, when I choose the themes they just appear in my head and I have no pre-conceptions of what I will do with that theme. I only think about it after my guest has chosen.
Walking around plotting this theme I came across a candy store. That made me think of Jelly beans. I remembered seeing a whole section in Selfridges with lots of different colours and flavours. There it was. 50 shades of Jelly beans it is! I actually bought all colours and initially was going to do a 3D version of this. I’m going to be honest, the sheer smell made my stomach turn (apologies to Jelly bean eaters) so I abandoned that idea and decided to create the Jelly bean shapes myself.
I made a drawing and painting of the flower shapes by hand and then worked in photoshop. Here’s the result. I had so many different versions that I drove myself completely crazy. I was fascinated to see how far I can take it and manipulate the image and what would work as a textile or wallpaper. For this purpose here I wanted the Jelly bean shapes to stand out. As a result I will post the whole process on Thursday in a separate post. So, flowers, colours and 50 shades of Jelly beans!
Thank you Caroline. Love having you here on Colourliving. You make flower decay beautiful and sexy! Magic…..