NEW THING: The Colour Lab

wherein I explain the options for subscribers to The Colour

Dear Collaborator:

Last week I asked about a Living University of Ink and you answered with about four hundred votes (in the form of little hearts) and 70 comments (which is impressive given that I inadvertently disabled the reader comments). To all those who liked and commented I thank you for your ideas and thank you for proving that a lively forum is possible and promising and could be fun. To all those who could not comment but have lots of ideas I hope that you can join in the discussion with the button below: (And maybe your could start by commenting on the colour of the button which is based on the rich purple of the Dundas overpass wild grape harvest of 2019.

For those of you who didn’t participate but who are feeling nervous about some kind change coming to something that seemed so pure and simple when you first signed up for it. I will try to make you feel less nervous and also condense the results of last week’s survey. As a group you said something like this:

“Please keep offering the same free newsletter that you have been writing that is a little island of non-commercial calm and an inspiring warren of colour-based rabbit holes arriving at the end of the week and (some of us) would like to support you with money but (most of us) want more, a chance to learn and share a be part of a natural colour scene. And although we’d like to learn and hear from experts and even be given prompts, please don’t call it university because that sounds top down and colonial and overly serious and like it might involve homework. Furthermore we have a whole bunch of ideas for you but if there is one thing that most (or at least quite a lot) of us want its recipes!”

At first I was thinking recipes? Really? can’t you just buy my book. But then I thought about it some more and realized that recipes go right to the heart of a citizen science shared colour community. Right to the heart of doing and discovering and making meaning-based ink and that it was time to create 3 options for you dear reader. So here goes:

1. The Colour (Classic): this is basically what you are already getting ( with a few less pictures, because, let me remind you, its free and you probably don’t deserve that many pictures! It will keep coming almost every Friday until I run out of ideas which hopefully will be never. Its free and its thoughtful and there is nothing quite like it and you can still help spread the word and see what people are talking about and put little hearts on things. (Have I sold this one too hard?)

2. NEW THING: The Colour Lab: This still has the newsletter at its heart but it allows you access to all the archives, all the comments and all the weird stuff that the group is exploring. And…it…has...a…recipe! or a secret tip or formula that gets you making. And the more people join the lab the more the recipes will become living recipes of shared knowledge about colours and places, methods and materials. This one costs $7 Canadian a month which is less than the cost of a bottle of gum arabic and practically free for my American friends. Also you should get in early in case it becomes really popular and tuition goes up.

3. STILL FIGURING OUT: The Colour Foundation: For those who want to help build the foundation of something lasting this third kind of colour is a yearly subscription which supports what I am doing in a deeper way. It’s for people or groups who want to invest in the colour revolution. If you are one of these people you will get all of the above benefits and I will send you in the mail a beautiful piece of original art (or ink test) for the walls of your revolutionary cabin deep in the woods.

A bit more context for people who are still reading

I wrote my first The Colour newsletter to you last summer about sneaking into a park to steal crab apple blossoms for an ink to send to an artist who has since then become an inspiration to the work I am doing. My idea back then was to send a quick note every week or so to you with a different pretty natural colour and maybe just do it for a month or two to see how it would work. In the first week almost a thousand people signed up (possibly because the colour was pink and the newsletter was free, but still) . Its seven months later and like all good adventures this has landed me in a totally different place than the place in which I started. I’m finding myself writing not just about colours but through colours. About moving my studio, about my only experience with Xanax, about a typographical revelation deep in a snowy woods up north, I’ve talked to you about talking to my non-binary teenager about a very special makeup with a crazy backstory, I introduced you to fellow collaborators of artists, scientists, filmmakers, activists, artists and revolutionaries I dug up peculiar histories, went deep on my love of burdock and found a really weird answer to the true meaning of Christmas. I got deliciously lost. Along the way I discovered that I really liked writing not what I thought I should be writing but what I was feeling and discovering through working with natural colour.

And it’s sort of working. People started liking my stories and responding and noticing and starting conversations in the chats and a world famous writer who famously refuses to be involved with social media and hates “commentary” of any kind even sent me note in response to a recent letter that just said “Thank You”. All that to say that the Colour is becoming bigger than just me and I hope you will join us.

Sincerly,

Jason Logan

The Toronto Ink Company