Pleasing to the Eye

Since moving into a bare apartment last month, I am learning about how to make my new home "pleasing to the eye". Part of that education has been the importance of color. After looking at maybe hundreds of bathrooms on pinterest and marthastewart.com, I realized that I am drawn to rooms with several shades of the same color and then a nice complimentary accent. 

I decided to test this idea on our bathroom. As you can see, our bathroom counter top is speckled black and gray and the cupboards are a reddish-brown. 

I was worried about choosing a shower curtain and bathmat that would clash with these colors. I decided to add some browns, tans, and white and then bring in a splash of some greens. 

As a side note, I wanted to learn how to take better indoor pictures and I found this website. I am definitely not an expert yet, but I thought I'd share what I learned.

 

Pompeii

Bastille, a band out of London, recently released their debut album, Bad Blood. One track, "Pompeii" caught my attention and I checked out the music video. Per our discussion on eyes and their impact, I thought it would be an interesting addition to our site this month. The song is about a conversation that the artist imagined occurring between two ash sculptures that were caught in the famous volcano disaster; the music video was filmed in Los Angeles as a kind of allegory to the Pompeii disaster. Check out what happens with the eyes in the video. What do you think it means?




To hear the band talk about the song, check out this site.

Little eyes

I'm cheating this month in that I'm not posting something that I feel like truly pushed me creatively, but it was a satisfying photo shoot nonetheless. My friend, Heather, has generously hired me for the past four years to work with her family to do their yearly photo shoot; while I haven't taken many clients due to the impending baby deadline, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to work with the Jenkins yet again. I admire my friend a great deal; she is a fantastic mother, always pushing her three creatively little ones to explore the world and not to be trapped by mindless activities and material wastelands. There are some beautiful things that come from working with the same clients for four years as well. We get along swimmingly! I know them and they know me and we know what to do together. This year's shoot was at our children's library, Imaginon, and it is one my favorite locations in the city because of the fun mix of whimsy, color, texture, and light, and it definitely captured the personality of their family. I went into the shoot not feeling my best. In fact, I felt like a rather un-creative lump whose only purpose was to incubate a baby and whose existence had no cognitive or creative value. However, this is where practice and experience are huge values to the creative arts as I was able to lean on previous experience to draw out my creative self and shake the cobwebs off.