Challenging Myself With Color- Pantone Striking Purple

For those of you guys who have been with me from the start, you know I began with color.

I was in living in a shoebox of an apartment in Tokyo. I had a fine arts background, but the apartment was too small to do any real art or store supplies. Nail art was already crazy in Japan then, and I took up painting on nails as sort of a design challenge. It was 2006-2007. Nail polish was around a whopping $20USD per bottle, so I figured I’d try mixing up my own colors. That’s where I got my start in the nail world.

I eventually moved into art, sculpture and other forms of decoration, but color was always a driving force behind the art. I’m ready to go back to my roots a bit and focus on color.

While some people might think these are the most boring postcards in the world, they are right up my alley. For those of you who are not color junkies, Pantone is a design firm specializing in color. Each of their gazillion shades are named/numbered and used for interior design, fashion, industrial applications- basically any application where a precise color is needed. They also designate a “Color Of The Year” and put out seasonal palettes of shades.

I’ve got 100 Pantone postcards. I don’t know if I’ll get to all 100 in this lifetime, but I’m going to pick one at random and try to mix up a matching polish shade, then show the results. Besides nail polish, I use pigments, nail polish, glitter and all kinds of other materials to get the perfect shade. I may or may not top off my color creations with nail art, but if a shade speaks to me, there’s no telling what will happen.

As we might remember from those early school days, primary colors (red, yellow, blue) can’t be mixed. I can tweak some shades of primaries to get a match, but if I get a straight red color, there’s not much I can do with that, except try to match an existing polish shade to it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet…

Let’s get it started with Pantone 18-305, Striking Purple.

This is what I’d call a mid-tone cool purple because it leans more blue than red. It’s pretty close to neutral but just eeking into that cool territory.

What colors can I use to make this shade? Glad you asked. 😉

I chose these three colors. The Warhol will warm up the Grape Pop, which is a bit too dark and cool for this color. The Bottoms Up will lighten it a bit without making it too warm, since it’s a cool pink. I guess we could rename the resulting franken Pop Grapes Up Warhol Bottoms, but let’s not. Though he might have approved, since apparently all manner of interesting things went on in the Silver Factory. Erm. Back to the polish.

I used roughly 70% Grape Pop, and 15% each of Warhol and Bottoms Up. I drop the polish color by color into my trusty silicone baking cup. It looked something like this:

Since my bottle of Grape Pop was close to empty, I used the brush from that to mix up the colors. If you don’t want to adulterate your bottle of polish, use a brush from a clear bottle of polish that’s dedicated to your color mixing. Just clean the brush with a paper towel or lint-free wipe between colors.

Here’s what I came up with. I’m sorry- I got so carried away with purple that I Konaded it and forgot to take the photo of the nails without the art. But you can get the general idea.

It’s a wee bit darker than the Striking Purple, but overall not a bad match.

I’m glad to be back where I started- mixing up colors! I will still be featuring art, but we’ll be seeing a lot more colors in upcoming posts. What are some colors you’d like to see? Let me know in the comments!