Playing with Light and Color

My 7½ year-old daughter, Freya, recently told me she’s done with rainbows. She knows that calling something ‘boring’ might feel a little judgemental so she calls whatever it is “classic” instead. This mostly applies to me and the small jokes and explanations I tell her. “Dad, I’ve heard this before. What you’re saying is so….classic.” And now rainbows are classic. I don’t think this will last very long because rainbows, classic as they may be, are very very cool. More on this later.

Home, making is an article series that celebrates creativity at home, either together with kids, in a group of adults or on your own. Your creative work will reassure you and maybe even startle you. It’s a reminder that you are a creative person, even if that’s not the way you feel when you start. Being creative sparks new ideas, builds strong memories and is one of the forces that makes a house into a home. Isn’t that worth dedicating some space to?

Last month I wrote about cardboard because everyone moving in has lots of it hanging around. Here’s another one for you: light. I like this one because it’s probably something you talked about at length when looking at houses. Where the sun rises, how much light comes in, where to relax in the evening sun, what light fixtures you like and (more likely) which you’ll replace immediately. So no matter what, you’ve got windows, and that means you’ve got a canvas.

Here’s where we get back into rainbows. The light coming through your window can be harnessed in so many ways. Prisms can be placed in your window or hung from a curtain rod. If you want to downplay how the prisms are hung, use fishing line or some other transparent filament. If you’re hanging something directly on the window, there are suction cup hooks that will do the job. And who could pass up a good disco ball? A fond memory I have from being at home during the pandemic is that around 10:15 every day, a rainbow would appear in our living room because that’s when the sun rays reflected off a swirly silver coil that we had hung from the ceiling. It was such a beautiful way to mark time passing when so much of the day just chugged along. 

Last weekend I got to be a part of the wildly successful Friendship Design Showhouse where eight talented local designers each took a room in a house and brought it to life in their own way. In designing the playroom I used toys that people are probably familiar with but used them in new ways. The article in Pittsburgh Magazine about the showhouse used an image of how we placed magnatiles in the window to catch the light, bringing out their brilliant colors. You can get into some color mixing as well. Something I find interesting is that combining blue and red tiles make a different color purple than the purple tiles, which you can sort of see here.

You can do this too! You can work in both directions, making designs in the window, or using the light that comes through the tiles as a decoration on your floor. Or on kids!

Magnatiles will definitely fall over if you stack them too high, so another way to go is tissue paper or other translucent material like thin colored plastic. You can cut and arrange pieces into a mosaic with those materials and hang that in the window. If you have a laminator, you can encase your mosaic in plastic that will hang easily in a window. 

There’s something truly amazing about using intangible materials like light and color in your creative work. And we didn’t even get into shadows yet!