Читать книгу Down to the River and Up to the Trees: Discover the hidden nature on your doorstep - Sue Belfrage - Страница 28

While it might not always seem like it on an overcast day, nature is bursting with colour. Even if you look closely at a cloud, you will notice different hues – pale pinks and lilacs, or steely blues. We are surrounded by colour even in the most built-up of spaces, from the pearlescent shimmer of a pigeon’s neck to the startling yellow sunbursts of dandelions growing in the pavement cracks. How many different shades of green, for instance, do you notice once you really start to look?

To open your artist’s eye, choose a colour for the day and make a mental note each time you spot it. Colours serve many functions in the natural world, such as camouflage and protection, as well as enticement for pollination or attracting mates, and they also tend to evoke particular cultural meanings.

If you feel inspired by what you see, sketch something that captures colour; it could be orange lichen on a rock, the pink inside a shell or rough brown crumbling wood – whatever catches your eye.

What does colour mean to you?

‘Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.’

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882), Nature, Addresses and Lectures