What is your favourite colour?

After spending so much time around colours, choosing colour palettes for new projects, looking at colourful art, crafts, food photography, fashion etc. I can’t answer this question anymore. Can you? Do you feel the more time you spend playing with colours, the more colours you like? But what about the colours you don’t like? 

What is your least favourite colour?

Did you ever have to do a project for a client, a custom order, or a gift for a friend with the colours they love, and you hate? Working with colours you don’t like can have a pretty negative impact on the entire project and your creativity. So I asked myself how to change that? How not to limit my choices? How to free myself from this negative approach to some colours? And how to enjoy working with any colour?

This exercise will not only give you creative freedom but will also teach how to be more understanding and less judgmental toward people choices of colours in clothing or home decor.
I'm not saying to accept, and like everything. After this exercise, you will go back to your favourite colours for your projects. Still, maybe next time when you will have to work with the not so cool colours, you will welcome the challenge with a smile and little less designer's ego, and approach your work with more enthusiasm.

• Step 1 - Find me
  Select the colour you dislike the most. Use colourful magazines, scraps of fabrics, coloured cards, scrapbook paper, yarn, thread, colour swatches from the DIY store, watercolour paint, coloured pencils, markers or crayons... Whatever materials you work with the most. 
  
  
• Step 2 - See me 
  Put the colour on the white or neutral colour background like a white desk and spend a few minutes looking at it and touching it, or even talking to it. I’m serious. Call me crazy, but it works! Just say something positive like ”you are an OK colour”, “I will try to create something nice with you”, “I know you want to play too” etc. The goal here is to see and accept this colour. Usually, you would automatically push it away or hide, but today let’s try to see it as “good” colour, an opportunity to learn and grow as a designer and artist. 
  
  
• Step 3 - Use me 
  If you like me, you probably have a lot of colourful stuff you work with all over your desk, and it’s a good chance you already accidentally discovered excellent colour companions for your new friend. Make a little mess and spread on your desk scraps of materials or colour swatches you have. Take the ” wrong” colour and place it near every other colour on your desk. Take your time, play with it and let yourself be surprised by the new colour palettes you will discover! 
  
  Set aside the colours you think will look good with your “bad” guy. Now you can start building a new colour palette based on those 2 colours by choosing another colour that looks good with both of these colours, but also with each of them separately. Repeat this process until you have up to 5 colours for the new palette.
  
  Another less messy way to get to like your new colour is to surround it with colours from the same colour “family”. If the “bad” colour is, e.g. dark navy blue, select different shades of blue or/and turquoise and see how they look together. Next, add to this group new colour like black or yellow or green etc. and build the new colour palette from here.
  
  I’m sure you already have found a few great new combinations, and your “wrong” colour is turning into OK colour or even the right colour. But if you don’t feel sure, yet there is one more thing you can do. The one place where there are no wrong colours, no bad colour combination - Nature! Take a look at flowers, insects or birds and see how your colour is doing there.

I hope you had fun during this little exercise!

Have a great & creative day!
Maja