Matchy Matchy

Bridget made a comment about students making birds that matched the clothes they were wearing.

Let me tell you a story...

WAY WAY WAY back when I was a freshman in college, I took a Printmaking class. It was at 8 AM three mornings a week. I remember our professor telling us one morning, "Class, please put your tools down and take a step back from your worktables." We did. "Now look down at what you are doing, and look at what you are wearing."

Every single student in the class was working with ink the color of the clothes we were wearing. In my case, it was red.

I never forgot it.

I've noticed it many times, and in fact, at that class at the Night Owl, I pointed it out to my students. They all laughed.

I remember years ago, when I worked in an art supply store, a local commercial artist would come into the store first thing in the morning with her two small sons. (This was before the advent of the personal computer.) The supplies she bought was not what got my attention. This lady and her two boys got my attention because they were always dressed in the same colors. If the Mom was wearing yellow, so were the boys. If it was blue, they were all in blue. Red and white? Didn't matter. I started to watch other mothers and kids to see if if happened there too, and it did, but only for very small children. I figured out that once a child was old enough to express a desire to dress themselves, the matchy matchy thing stopped happening.

I caught on to the "morning" part of it when the same commercial artist would shop in the middle of the day. The kids didn't match their mom. I surmised that they had gotten dirty and had had to change their clothes...

So my theory is that the color of something you reach for when you're getting dressed first thing in the morning stays in your head somehow, and when you reach for fabric shortly afterwards, your brain often goes for the same color. (Assuming, of course, that you were starting from scratch, and didn't have a particular color chosen already.)

Funny, isn't it?