COLOUR HUNTING: THE ART OF SEEING WHAT WAS ALREADY THERE

By Dagmar: Collector of colours, textures and quiet moments, always looking for the little bit of beauty hiding in plain sight.

When one colour changes the way you see

Lately, I keep seeing colour hunting everywhere.

It seems to have become a little creative obsession on Instagram, with beautiful collections of photographs appearing in every imaginable shade: dusty pinks, Mediterranean blues, earthy browns, butter yellows, faded greens. People wandering through cities and landscapes with their cameras, collecting little pieces of one colour and bringing them together into the most wonderful moodboards.

And every time I see one, I think: Oh, we've been doing this for years.

Long before Instagram existed, before Pinterest became our endless source of inspiration and before anyone had given it a name that I knew of, my friend Beverly and I would regularly spend entire days doing exactly this.

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  Dagmar and her DSLR camera

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  Vintage cameras in window

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  Friend in old street with DSLR camera

We would put our DSLR cameras around our necks, head out into a city and give ourselves a mission.

One colour.

That was it.

Not necessarily because we wanted to create a beautiful colour palette afterwards, and certainly not because we were following some creative exercise we had found somewhere. It was simply much more fun to give ourselves a little challenge.

Today, we're looking for red.

And suddenly, the whole city becomes a treasure hunt.

The magic of one colour

What happens when you decide that you are only going to photograph one particular colour is rather wonderful.

You begin to see things you would normally never see.

If you're simply walking through a city, you might notice the beautiful old buildings, the interesting shop windows or the lovely café you've just passed. But when you're hunting for red, your eyes start behaving differently.

There it is.

A tiny flash of burgundy on the back of a chair.

A faded red door that you hadn't noticed before.

The almost-orange brown of an old terracotta pot.

A rusty bicycle leaning against a wall.

A child's plastic toy lying on the pavement.

A collection of blood oranges at a market.

And then, just when you think you've found everything there is to find, you spot the tiniest hint of red tucked away somewhere completely unexpected.

That's the moment I love.

Because colour hunting isn't really about finding red.

It's about discovering how many versions of red exist.

Burgundy.

Brick.

Rust.

Terracotta.

Coral.

Scarlet.

A faded, dusty red that has been bleached by years of Mediterranean sunshine.

A brownish red that looks almost like old leather.

A bright orange-red that suddenly jumps out at you from somewhere you would never have thought to look.

And because you've given yourself this little mission, you notice them.

Without the mission, you would probably have walked straight past.

Suddenly, you are looking everywhere

I think that is the real magic of colour hunting.

It changes the way you move through the world.

You start looking down at the pavement, then up at balconies, then into shop windows. You look behind you. You look at the little corner of a building that everyone else is walking past. You start noticing what is reflected in a window rather than what is displayed inside it.

And the most ordinary places suddenly become interesting.

A rusty sign.

A piece of rope.

A stack of old crates.

A beetle sitting on a leaf.

Wildflowers growing through a patch of dry grass.

A discarded wrapper.

Even, yes, a little pile of bear poop if that beholds a bright red berry you're hunting for.

Why not?

It's your colour mission.

There are no rules.

And I think that's what makes it such a lovely creative exercise for children too.

A holiday game for everyone

Imagine giving a child a phone or a little camera before heading into a village you've never visited and saying, Today we're hunting for yellow.

Suddenly the walk becomes a game.

Who can find the strangest yellow?

Who can find the tiniest one?

Can you find three completely different yellows?

Can you find one in nature and one made by people?

And suddenly they aren't simply being dragged around another pretty town while the grown-ups stop to look at yet another old building.

They're looking.

Really looking.

Perhaps they photograph a lemon, a faded wall and a pair of sandals. Perhaps they photograph a rubbish bin because it happens to be the most glorious mustard yellow they've ever seen.

Perfect.

The photograph doesn't have to be beautiful.

The discovery does.

And isn't that a lovely way to teach a child how to use a camera?

Not by explaining aperture, composition and all the things we adults sometimes think photography needs to be about, but simply by saying:

'Go and find something that makes you curious'.

The unexpected colour match

One of my favourite parts of colour hunting is when two completely unrelated things suddenly seem to belong together.

Imagine finding a patch of wildflowers in exactly the same dusty pink as a dress in a shop window.

Or a weathered blue fishing boat that somehow matches the blue on an old man's shirt as he walks past.

A terracotta wall beside a basket of oranges.

A faded green door beside the leaves growing around it.

A rusty bicycle next to a pile of old bricks.

Nobody designed these combinations.

Nobody styled them.

They simply happened.

And yet when you put the photographs together later, they can create the most beautiful moodboard. This is often where my own colour hunting takes me: towards a moodboard, where little discoveries become a palette, a feeling and eventually an idea. You can wander through some of mine [here].

That is when colour hunting becomes particularly interesting to me.

You're not simply collecting photographs.

You're collecting connections.

Imagine doing this on holiday

This is why I think colour hunting makes such a lovely holiday ritual.

Instead of coming home with hundreds of photographs of the same church, the same beach and everyone standing in front of the same monument, you might return with a completely different kind of travel diary.

Perhaps you've spent a morning hunting for dusty blue in a Greek village.

Your collection might include a piece of peeling paint, a faded chair, a fishing rope, the sky reflected in a window, a plastic bucket, someone's shirt, a tiny piece of sea glass and a weathered door.

Individually, none of these photographs necessarily says Greece.

Put them together and suddenly they do.

They carry the light, the dust, the salt, the age and the feeling of the place.

And that, to me, is far more interesting than simply photographing what everyone else is photographing.

From camera roll to colour story

Then comes my favourite part.

You come home.

You open your camera roll and start putting your little discoveries together.

Perhaps you create a moodboard from them.

Perhaps you print them and pin them above your desk.

Perhaps they inspire a painting.

Maybe you use the palette to style a room, choose a piece of fabric, paint a cabinet or create a collection of objects for your home.

Maybe you simply save the images because you love them.

There is no particular purpose required.

Creativity doesn't always need to become something.

Sometimes collecting is enough.

But I do love the idea that something you found completely by accident on holiday can eventually find its way into your home.

A faded blue you saw on a Greek door becomes the colour of a wall.

A warm brown from an old fishing boat finds its way into a moodboard.

A dusty red you spotted on a rusty bicycle becomes the starting point for a painting.

The holiday stays with you, not just in your memories, but in the colours you brought home.

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  Carousel with horse in France

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  vintage blue scooter in france

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  Old patina doors

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  Historical building in Dinard

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  Dagmar dancing on the cliffs in France

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  Hand on brass patina blue door

And perhaps that's why I still love it

Looking back, I think Beverly and I were onto something all those years ago.

We weren't trying to become better photographers.

We weren't trying to create perfect images.

We were simply giving ourselves permission to wander around and notice things.

One colour at a time.

And there is something incredibly freeing about that.

Because once you've decided what you're hunting for, you don't have to search very hard.

The colour starts finding you.

You begin to realise that colour is everywhere.

We just don't always see it.

Your next colour mission

So, the next time you go away, take your camera.

Or your phone.

Choose one colour before you leave.

It doesn't have to be a colour you particularly love. In fact, choosing one you normally wouldn't notice can make the whole thing even more interesting.

And when you find that little unexpected flash of your colour in the most unlikely place, take the photograph.

Because that is the bit you'll remember.

Not necessarily the big view.

But the tiny discovery that would have been invisible if you hadn't been looking for it.

And perhaps, when you get home, you'll put all those little discoveries together and realise you've created something rather beautiful without ever intending to.

A colour story.

A memory.

A mood.

A little piece of the world, seen through your eyes.

And maybe that's what colour hunting really is.

'A reason to slow down, look closer and discover the extraordinary hiding inside the ordinary.'

Dagmar

Linen & Wood