Palettes

Here is a Zyla-inspired palette I made for my new online friend J. yesterday. I won’t post her photo with it because no. I think it’s amazingly pretty, and I’m frankly a tad jealous!

Laying Sci-art to Rest.

Well. Yesterday, I finally sat down and posted a whole bunch of real life drapings for the Figure My Season Facebook group, and the results were fairly well unanimous. What’s my MIT? Darkness and some warmth.

Ladies and gentleman, I’m Dark Autumn.

Which I kind of have been thinking for quite some time anyway, so!

Now all I need to do is figure out how to get myself a fan, and then I can start shopping for fabrics to make stuff with!

The funniest part about all of this is that I’ve always felt for sure that black is so bad on me. In fact, there was quite a lengthy discussion about the black and what it was doing to me. It turns out that everyone else thinks it’s really not so bad at all, and that I can handle that kind of darkness. Some even said they saw some skin clearing, too, though it was generally said that black is not The Best on me. A very dark almost-black or a softer black would undoubtedly be well. So how about that?

Burgundy was well liked, as well as, surprisingly, this medium sunny yellow. The yellow wasn’t perfect, but was nice on my skin. It did cast something of a shadow on the sides of my face, though, so the yellow color wasn’t just so, but there was something to like about it (so sayeth multiple people). I think it would do well were it a little browner and taken into the goldenrod territory. So now, I’ll be on the lookout for goldenrod-colored things as well! Pure white was an absolute, unanimous NO, which I guessed myself because I look very sickly in white. No one at all liked the charcoal gray, but I think if it were warmer (gunmetal?) I would like it a lot.

Dark brown, if warmed up some, was liked. I would like it too, but it’s so hard to find warmed up browns that aren’t TOO warm! The light browns/taupes were not well liked in general, because I needed more darkness than that. Cream was great, which is what I expected as I like it very well myself. The avocado green 2-in-1 was liked, though I saw some reflection under the chin, as well as the teal one. Which is awesome because I picked out both of those after having determined initially that I was Dark Autumn, and shopped them online using the palette (above) which I have saved on my computer! 🙂

It’s odd that almost all of the scarves I own are cooler, or at least far too cool for me. That was the general concensus: “This is far too cool, that is far too cool”…although there were a couple of instances where something was too warm, namely the rust/orange scarf I have. I’ve always kept those colors far away from my face, though, so no harm there. Up close both were dastardly, although I will say that all of the commentary about it was dead set against the orange. Which I knew all along. Orange is BAD on me. BAD. …AND the reason why I didn’t think for pretty much forever that I was an Autumn at all, because I could not wear orange well. Of course, I was imagining pumpkins and the like, which are for a True Warm Autumn. No, I am not that. I do have some neutral, too, and lean darker. But I’m told I ought to go a lot warmer than what I have been doing. Almost everyone commented on how they would like to see me in warmer recs, just to see what it would do. Alas, I don’t have much and draped literally everything I had to work with.

I was extremely gratified that everyone else saw that Brights were too bright for me. The true red was a definite no, as were the royal blue and the lime. Between the three it was easy to rule out Bright Winter and Bright Spring altogether. Which is good, because I hate both! I almost had a panic attack when I was doing the digital drapings in GIMP and was told by Buffy that she liked the Brights the best. That, I’m afraid, may have been a case of “I like the colors that look well on ME, not you”…just like I did when she was posting up what everyone else thought SHE was. I said I thought she was Dark Autumn. She turned out to be Bright Spring.

The teal paisley pashmina wasn’t entirely liked, however there WAS something about it to like. Going warmer was suggested, as it looked a touch too cool.

LOTS and LOTS of comments of this or that are ALMOST good, but a bit– or WAAAAAY!– too cool.

I need to work on my eye some to make sure I buy the right things.

Next order of business is to try and get myself a fan! If I can somehow manage to make one from this palette out of paint chips, I will SO do that! Otherwise, I’m afraid the palette strip will have to wait till tax time next year.

TMIT.

…an abbreviation for The Most Important Thing.

And so I wonder…what is MY Most Important Thing. I think I’ve been going at this color thing all wrong. I’m trying to match up my hair and eyes to something, and reeling in the understandings of others on which thing is my Most Important. But the truth of the thing is that it’s not the hair or the eyes that is important, it is the skin and how it reacts to things. And since I have no way to drape myself and see what is or would be best, I have to instead figure out what my Most Important Thing is.

Christine Scaman on her website 12 Blueprints says this of The Most Important Thing:

“There are three dimensions or measurable properties of colour that we use for personal colour analysis:

– value – how light to dark

– hue – or heat level, how cool to warm

– saturation or chroma – a colour’s position between the most grayed version of the colour and the purest version of the colour”

And what I must consider is which of these is the most important for my skin. At this point, all I have is this:

* Lightness to darkness: I appear dark because of my hair and eyes, but darkness doesn’t do me any huge favors. It’s only because of the darkness of my hair and eyes that I can carry it off to some degree.
*Coolness to warmth: Warm is better than cool by all means, but it is certainly not TMIT about me. I have already tested a variety of cools, and they are BAD.
*Saturated to grayed: I don’t know about this one. My head wants to say not saturated, and if this is brightness level, I am most certainly NOT bright.

Here’s what I DO know about myself:

*Anything with brown in it turns my skin to mud, especially if it’s a lipstick. I can tolerate types of browns on my eyes to some degree.
*Black turns me extremely pale. See this photo:

This look would be awesome if I were, say, a goth. lol

*Coolness is not my friend. Charcoal on my face looks awful. I’m definitely NOT cool.
…to be continued.

And to compare…

Not sure if this would be Dark or Soft Autumn. I’m inclined to trust the palette I made more than someone else’s. I’m going to check out a few more, too, like maybe even Dark Winter or Soft Summer, and see how the comparison goes.

Dark Winter (which at one time I thought yes to) seems like a definite nope!

This is VERY close…but I think it’s a smidgen too cool. The grays here are fabulous, and the 2nd Base is *almost* there, but I lose some of the greens which are so essential to my palette (since they’re my eye colors). So, hmmn.

It’s been awhile, but…

So the old computer can’t hack livejournal (6/3/15 update: I’ve since moved here to WordPress), and I’ve been not posting for a while. Just wanted to quickly update on my palette stuff.

I made a new palette for Zyla recently, but it still wasn’t quite right, so two days ago I tweaked it and came up with this:

And now I’m starting to doubt the Dark seasons altogether. I’ve already determined I’m definitely no Dark Winter (though I thought so for a while) because I do have some warmth. So I started looking into Autumns (haha full circle at long last!), and thought, surely I must be Dark Autumn, because dark hair and dark eyes, right?

Well, maybe not so much, because comparing this to Dark Autumn, I can clearly see how muted it is. So now I’m perhaps thinking Soft Autumn (which is incidentally the same as my little guy, although he has FAR less contrast than I do– he’s straight up very low contrast and I’m more low-medium contrast).

Interesting.

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And now, let’s compare the palette I made with the official Invent Your Image Soft Autumn palette: