Red & Blue & Delicate Green...

It's funny what snippets of verse will hang on in our minds for seemingly ever. When I was a child, I used to get these small bi-weekly (I think) magazines during the summer, with stories and games to occupy the elementary schoolchild's mind. I don't remember the name of the magazine, or the name of the story from which this snippet of verse came, but it's hung on forever in my noggin:
"Red and blue and delicate green, the king can't catch it, neither can the queen
The rain and sun will make one soon, answer this riddle by tomorrow noon!"

So it was that I was entranced by our beloved photographer David Perry's latest photography assignment, only he referred to Red, Green and Blue. The assignment was to just play with the three colours; to let our inner kid go. Good enough!


The trick for me was finding something red I wanted to play with. Red isn't my favourite colour by a long shot, except I do love it in the garden. And curiously, I have a number of red fleece pullovers for wearing outdoors through the fall and winter, as part of my 'Push against the winter blahs' prescription. So I used one of those as a backdrop for the things I photographed, including this curious section of a many-pointed star made out of metallic foil and paper. It looks like a flower when you look at it from one angle, like a star when you set it up on a table. It's actually sort of like the Moravian glass stars that Anna used in her assignment.
There's a very cool tea room down in Melvern Square, near Kingston, NS, which sells fairly traded items from nations such as Thailand and India. This bracelet is made of glass beads in a rainbow of blues from turquoise to cobalt, and is one of my favourite things though it cost very little. Set it on a favourite silk scarf, added a deep blue filter to really bring out the blue, and voila: an explosion of cool, rich, soothing blue.

I have a lot of green in my house; my office walls are green, lots of plant leaves, etc, etc. But I wanted something rich and emerald green to play with for this project. I found what I was looking for in a drawer; a string of Mardi-gras beads given to me last year to promote the Acadian festival in Clare. Dropped onto a rich green tablecloth, they suited my purposes perfectly.

This was so much fun, I actually did more photos, most with several items in each shot, and then made up collages of them. But I think we'll save those for the next post, just to keep with the purity of this project. Thanks to David for creating this assignment, and for the thoughts he shared in encouraging us.