Wedding Pastels

This week's contest required a restricted palette:


Color by COLOURlovers

Also including black and white if we wished. And we could make it wedding themed if we liked. I went very slightly wedding-themed by using ampersands. (Y'know, joining two things together...)



I was thinking of doing a bunch of different ampersands, but eventually decided it looked nicer with just the one over and over. I arranged the colors to make a semi-plaid. This entry maintained the pattern I've been in - twenty-something likes, several dozen votes, ending in the bottom half. My favorites were the roses, the fruit, and the gems.

Animal pals

For the theme "interspecies friendship," I had about an hour to pull something together. Originally, I was going to do a representation of the Norse myth that there's a squirrel that runs up and down the world tree, bringing gossip back and forth between the dragon at the bottom and the eagle at the top. When I was looking up the names of these animals, I found out that in the legend, the eagle actually has a hawk on top of his head! This struck me as funny so I went with just that pair.



My favorite was the super-cutesy sheep + bird. My design made no impact in the competition and remained in the bottom third. I'm pretty happy with how it came out, though.

Eighties Hair

For the theme "eighties hair," I went for the classic decade avoidance strategy and changed centuries. Yes, I did 1880's hair instead of 1980's.



As is usual, this came in about in the middle - but for the first time this year, it actually squeaked just into the top half! There were very few designs in this one I liked at all, but I thought the most appealing were the hair bows.

Edited to add: I gathered up this board of hairstyle inspiration, and used (some of) these colors:

Color by COLOURlovers

Year of the Monkey

Recently, the contest theme was monkeys, since this is the year of the monkey in the Chinese zodiac. I went with just the Chinese symbol for monkey, using the colors, white, gold, and blue, which are supposedly auspicious for the year of the monkey.



The colors are actually the same as the ones from the state fair ribbons. I looked up several different versions of the character to try to come up with a rendering somewhat like what would be used in a chop,

I had so much fun with this, I tried making versions for all twelve animal ideograms of the zodiac, continuing to use the recommended zodiacal colors as documented on wikipedia. You can see them all here.

My entry came in right smack dab in the middle of results. My favorite was this landscape of frolicking monkeys.

Spin spin whoosh smack

For the theme "pinata," I went with some traditional star-shaped pinatas, arranged into a pattern based on this tiling. The colors are the synergy "mad" set, previously used here.



This actually seemed like it was going to perform better than I expected - twenty-six likes! However, it got barely more votes than that, and came in about two-thirds down the result list. My favorite entry was the crepe paper fringe repeat.