[ Lost in the Landscape ]

inspired by nature: colors

I wrote earlier about how the eucalyptus trees in my area had started to shed their bark and mentioned how there were some interesting colors combinations that were happening as part of the process. The trees have continued shedding bark all summer and now into fall.

Not long ago I was talking to Linda about colors, and she’d mentioned being struck by some of the same colors herself, and how someday she thought it might be interesting to make a quilt using some of those unexpected juxtapositions of color.

The widowmaker

For fun, I’ve taken some photos and made color palettes based on them using the tools at colourlovers.com. Most of the combos come from colors on the bark, but the last one below derives from the colors of new leaves against the berry-red shades of the new stems.

These are all on the literal side. You could take any of these pictures and get a lot wilder–especially into the plum-grape-purple territory.

The titles for the palettes–“widomaker”–comes from the dark nickname gum trees have in Australia because of their casual habit of dropping branches onto unsuspecting folk below. It’s not hyperbole. Twice, just this past year, I’ve come within less than fifty feet of having big branches dropped on my head.