The Colour Collaborative - March - Bird

Do you know much about birds? I don't. Some people, like my mum and my friend Kate, can correctly identify a bird by it's song or a glimpse of an outline in a tree, and what a skill that is. I wish I could do that because, if it's not a seagull or a blackbird, I'm pretty useless. Actually, no, bluetits and robins, I know what they look like. And an emu, I'm fairly confident I could correctly identify an emu if I saw one wandering around. 

But seagulls, oh you know I love seagulls. I even embroidered one.

I'll tell you one thing I do actually know; a "seagull" is not one single species of bird, but more a generic label given to all different kinds of gulls which happen to be coastal, and are commonly and collectively known as seagulls. I know, I know, they're mean, they're bullies, they steal chips and divebomb innocent holiday makers for ice creams, but they charm me. I can hear their squawks often now we live on the coast, and it delights me, it truly does. It's a sound which makes me think of summer, of holidays, of long days spent at the beach, and I hope I never tire of it.

There is something very quintessentially British about the humble seagull and I think it is because it's colours so closely and beautifully reflect those of our shores. Grey and white with the odd splash of yellow or orange, the colours of our beaches.

Our seas are more often silver than turquoise, and the skies more often cloudy and white than deep blue. Variation and contrast is provided by the yellows and browns of the shoreline, the grey-green of the sea grass, a bright orange buoy bobbing around in the water. 

It's a moody palate, subtle and always shifting with the weather, but it's as beautifully British to me as eating chips on the pier. 

*

Don't forget to visit the other Colour Collaborative blogs for more of this month's posts, just click on the links below:

Annie at Annie Cholewa

Sandra at Cherry Heart

Jennifer at Thistlebear

Claire at Above The River

What is The Colour Collaborative? 

All creative bloggers make stuff, gather stuff, shape stuff, and share stuff. Mostly they work on their own, but what happens when a group of them work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. We'll each be offering our own monthly take on a colour related theme, and hoping that in combination our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways.