What you said on the three is yellow post has really made me curious how your emotional interpretation effects your art. I'd love to see the difference in you painting to your feelings and the colours they represent vs the "standard" of like yellow being happy and red being aggressive etc. Is your favourite colour related to what emotion it is for you? What about people around you and the colours they wear it dye their hair etc? I have so many questions... (Feel free to publish btw.)
I actually spent about two years when I was doing really intense trauma therapy with my watercolour pad and my paints with me in session, just doing nonsense shapes and colours based on how i was feeling. I had mentioned the synesthesia thing to my psych and he was really interested in it. It turned out to be a really useful tool and allowed him to track the kinds of things that would get an emotional reaction out of me, and by starting a new page and painting in calm safe colours it was easy for me to calm down at the end of the session. I’ve got dozens of paintings done like this, with notes on what we spoke about. They take up an entire wall when I put them up. They’re very abstract, and I found it easier to ‘read’ them if i followed a pattern around the page, not doing anything in the same spot twice, more like writing than drawing.
Starting at the top left hand corner and around in an anticlockwise spiral around the edges of the page somehow made sense.
I’ve always been able to connect memories to what i’m drawing at the time, its how I used to take notes in class. I would draw continuously with a pen and when I look at each spot i remember what was said or what I was thinking when I did that. Now it helps me to remember the things we talk about in therapy, and also i can see patterns in things when I have them all up on a wall. Its most useful when i am actually in hospital and seeing my doctor multiple times a week and discussing trauma/theory/feelings in a safe environment where i can actually bust them open and not be left to my own devices afterwards, because then i can physically see the pattern of my emotional state for the past week, and how it changes depending on the topic of the week. Or pinpoint what session (and what we were discussing in that session) caused me to have a breakdown.
I don’t tend to use colours in the same way in my digital art, most of the work i post online is more illustrative than emotional, or is intended to share a feeling to other people and not just as a reference for myself, so how i can communicate emotions to people outside my head plays more into the choices i make. Mostly I just have to pick music that kind of matches the colour pallette i’m using with stuff, hozier doesn’t work with something like the brightly coloured frogs so I listen to jpop and billie eilish when I’m doing them. I tend to leave my more emotional art for traditional mediums, bc of the way you pick colours from a physical palette and blend. I find colour picking on something like PS where you’re moving sliders around to interrupt the ‘feels right’ aspect of choosing colours from a paint tray.
