Colors of Inspiration

So, having chosen all my colors and my general plan for decorating the apartment, it remained now to try to figure out the best way to present that color...and of course, to make the Gardener's Nest my own.

I already had some interesting ideas along the line of cave paintings for the living room, but was open to suggestion for the other rooms. So, imagine my amusement and excitement when this old book appeared on my stairs late last week.

At first, I thought perhaps Patience had played fairy god-landlord and left it to encourage me, but it turns out the book had been loaned by her to a potential sign painting customer...and they'd left it on my steps when they returned it.

So it was much more random, but no less welcome an arrival on the shores of my creativity.

I've always been kind of fascinated with the styles and patterns of the Art Deco period, and also ironically amused by a society that treats nature with such disregard yet uses representations of it constantly...to the point of it almost being unnoticeable. This book was lots of fun to flip through, especially since the patterns featured were almost entirely floral in nature...and the color combinations were pretty enjoyable, too.

I really liked this poppy pattern, and it occurred to me it would be a relatively easy design to recreate as a floor painting...if I was ever feeling quite that motivated. Anyway, the pattern is fun and simple. If I was going to recreate any of them, it would be this one, I think.

I could say the same of each of these. I'm not sure I have it in me to be quite so elaborate. After all, it would be nice to have the painting finished and the business of unpacking and properly settling in well underway by October...and some of these would take considerably longer, I think.

But still, looking at these got me thinking about some ways to bring more of my beloved flowers into the design of the place, and so with that in mind, I visited AC Moore (the craft supply store) yesterday and picked up a few inexpensive flower stencils to play with.

I really liked the way the pansies were represented in the pattern below, and I might actually try to recreate a bit of that, though not necessarily with all the detail of the Roman figures and such. Which isn't to say I'm not fond of the way the flowers replace their heads sometimes, or seem to be utilized as shields and armor.


And of course, there's someone in the household who thought the cat representation was something we ought to do. We'll see. For my part, I was particularly fond of these doves and might find a place for a single one, hand-painted, somewhere in the Nest.