Accordion Books 10 and 11

Accordion Books 10 and 11

Now I am one of the ones apologizing for a bad photo!

I worked on the above accordion books over the last couple of days. The ideas gained momentum as I watched a local newscast. The reporter was showing a map of the Western United States and explaining about where all of the fires were burning. California didn't look great but it was nothing in comparison to Washington state. Wow! The whole state looked like it was one gigantic ball of flames. The arid West is in such trouble.

In any case, I took that idea along with some others and began to compose the above images. I have been wanting to use some general colors to show drought or the idea of the lack of any obvious symbols for water. To me, lack of water looks brown, or beige or white or gold. Those colors are also typical of our area in general. A symbolic color for water could be blue. Most everyone might picture that color when you mention water. (Unless you live say in Colorado where the river could be brown or red!) Anyway, you get the idea. I also pictured burned fields of which I have seen quite a few as of late. The gray and white colors for me mean smoke in this case and the red sun is exactly what it seems: glowing red because of the atmospheric haze. 

I think with some judicious clean up, I could have a few ideas for compositions. I am also going to use a new-to-me idea gleaned form the blog of Julie Ford Oliver, as seen in a post here.  She advocates dividing your composition into quarters and then checking for undue repetition (of value, color, line, etc.) or as she calls it, "matchy-matchy"! This goes under the heading of wish I had thought of that sooner! So, stay tuned to see if I can do it successfully:)

Thanks for reading and commenting.

Libby