When you look at the past few years of the Pantone Fall forecasts you can see that there are similarities in the sets of colors selected. There’s always a yellow, a teal/turquoise blue, an off pink, a clear purple, a deep red or orange,  a muted green of some kind, and a neutral. Plus a few other accent colors.

My challenge to you for this Saturday School session is to come up with your own fall forecast. Make your Rainbow Skinner  Blend following the instructions on page 19, and then play with the colors of the background strips to see if you can get a few variations that work for fall.

The Stripe Blends combine stripes of many colors from your Rainbow Skinner laid out in an alternating pattern with a single background color. After making the four stripe blends from the book – Sunlight, Ecru, Cool Shadow and Dark Mud – play with using other background colors to come up with your Fall blend.

A few years before the book was published Lindly taught a  NYC workshop and photographed the results. The photos show lots of great ideas for blends and projects. She is still teaching this workshop. Its at the top of Lindly’s list of workshops if you are interested in bringing it to your guild.

Weekend Extra Exercises

Make lots of striped blends! Try using variations of colors for the in-between stripes:

  • Dark Brown/Burnt Umber – will make the colors more earthy
  • Light Brown/Raw Umber – will give the colors a faded folk art feel
  • Metallic Gold mixed 1/2 and 1/2 with white – will shift all the colors toward yellow but with a muted warm glow

TIPS

An easy way to make the mud for this project is to take some of your Rainbow Skinner blend and mix into a single color. It will make a perfect mud for your colors.

Vary the stripe width slightly every now and then as you cut colors from your Skinner blend for an unexpected punch.

You don’t have to stick with the same three primaries from past exercises. You are designing for next week’s project – Log Cabin Pin – so choose colors for your Rainbow Skinner blend that you will want to wear this fall.

Next Saturday School: Log Cabin Pin