Hello dear newsletter friend. I am not sure how you ended up finding me or this newsletter or the world of natural colour and inkmaking. I am pretty into following my instincts and just sending out what feels right, but for some reason I have been looking back this week on what is over a year of writing The Colour. And looking back at the whole range of letters to you I figured it might be time to try to explain myself. So here goes:
How I got here
The first Colour newsletter was about the pinkish colour of crab apple blossoms stolen at night, intensified and almost pixilated into a bottle of ink sent off to my friend Yuri Shimojo, which would in turn join many other stories. I wrote about the brick dust they make the french open clay from, the brilliant eye of my sister’s walking photography, how Italian flamingos relate to life on Mars, non-binary makeup from a blue that comes from dead bodies, and my love of handwriting. I promised you a colour every week. And I have not missed a week. There was even a Christmas and Valentine’s special edition (a personal favourite). Looking back, it seems that by trying to honestly share what I was thinking about colours I have found a way into my own sense of myself in the world. But I also have a mission a kind of slow business that I believe in.
What I’ve Been Building
I started writing this newsletter last year because the little squares of my instagram account felt more like a flicker of what I was experimenting with rather than the full story. I wanted to dig into the way that meaning and colour get together in natural ink. I also wanted to give you a kind of dream-world of colour to dive into, something as fluid and promising and visceral as natural ink is moving across the page. I was also hoping to make something so satisfying that some of you would be willing to pay $7 a month to get a dispatch about the world of colour so that I could continue to do my weird experiments and have enough time to write and think about colour rather than going back to some corporate job moving little boxes around on the computer screen and using the ink-dropper tool to pick hex colours for websites. Below is a series of ads I made for instagram to try to explain my business using a bunch of the weirder colours I have been experimenting with this year.
And finally a special offer
If you are reading this you are a part of The Colour, but I want to ask you directly for help in supporting the mission by becoming a paying member. If you are not that into the mission but you just like me or are a long-time enjoyer of these weekly posts or you are just feeling flush right now it would also be the perfect week to subscribe because I am offering just for this weekend this special.
More rambling stories and references to anthocyanins, mordants and roadtrips next week. Happy Summering. —Jason
That’s a good idea
Thankyou. It was strangely satisfying to put those litttle squares together