Mood Board:  Texture and Color

By Cathy M Koos

 

 

Mood Boards.  Remember those?  Texture and color as inspiration is all around us if we just open our eyes and hearts.  A quick look around my studio office and I find a crinkled sheet of aluminum foil catching and reflecting the sun and shadows of early afternoon.  The fuzzy green leaf of an African violet plant.

 

 

The soft hand of my favorite blue cotton cable knit sweater I scored at the local thrift store.  The heather brown ruffled nap of my dog’s favorite toy – precious Hedgehog. A black and white woven-strip rug mug resting under a hand-thrown pottery.

 

A step outside and I am almost overwhelmed by nature’s texture.  The life-giving rains here in Sutter Creek have encouraged the mosses and lichens on the patio wall to revive.  A recent wind has brought down lichen-encrusted branches from the ancient oak trees.  Each branch is like a miniature forest teeming with grays and greens.

 

An interesting but unwelcome texture is the muddy clay.  I see the tread of my tires preserved in the mud. Mud here in the Amador foothills is a distinctive red color.  This silty stuff stains your socks, towels, and demands throw rugs in the house.  Not the brown sticky mud of the valley, nor the dark brown mud of the coastal redwood forests, just iron red glop.

 

 If it’s muddy, mushroom season must be coming on, too.  I love the spongey undersides of boletes and the rippled, brain-like appearance of morels; the festive frills of the parasol mushroom; the elegant ruffles of chanterelles; the quivering gelatinous texture and sulfur yellow of aptly named yellow brain fungus.

 

A mood board can capture these textures and colors and help spark and inspire a completely new project or guide you in color and pattern in a project you are designing.  How do you build a mood board?  There are lots of methods – from cutting out or printing pictures in similar colorways and making a collage on a large piece of foam board.  The collage can be orderly with the pictures lined up or laid down in an impromptu style.

 

You can also grab a cork board and start pinning up pictures, scraps of fabric, bits of yarn, ribbon, and leaves.  This is a more free-flowing method that I prefer.  Either way, I like to put the foam board or cork board somewhere I will walk past it a number of times a day, catching the varying light throughout the day. 

 

You can play with the colors, add or subtract objects, and rearrange all while letting the creative muse free.