corvi

I keep a visual journal: each day, I answer a handful of questions with a colour. I love looking back at them at the end of the year, watching for patterns in the way time flowed over the year.

maribou commented on them this year, and inspired me to actually run my collation program and post the results.

Each horizontal band is a single day. January 2019 at the top to December 2019 at the bottom.

1. What colour is the sea?
This is the question I started with, back in 2017. It might be my favourite. I want a way to make a sea-coloured scarf I can wear, with all the daily sea-colours on it. There's a lot of day to day variation, but some overall trends: purple-grey in later winter, grey-blue in spring, deep blue in summer, greenish in autumn, and green-gray in early winter.

2. What colour is the sky?
Of special note: intermittent purple in late summer and early autumn. The purple sunsets were caused by the eruption of the Ulawon volcano, which dumped clouds of ash into the stratosphere, where they occasionally wandered across the sky and made for lovely purple sunsets. Unlike last year, no ugly yellow-grey forest fire haze this ear.

What colour are the crows?
New question this year. (Included ravens). Silly, but fun. I would definitely wear a crow-coloured scarf. Or coat! A coat of many crows!

What colour is the moon?
This one failed to show the elegant cycle I imagined when I added it to the journal this year; I just missed too many days. Unsure whether to keep it. I'd like a format for the visual journal that is better at reminding me when I miss a day, but i'm not sure what that would be. Of special note: lunar eclipse January 20 (red).

What colour is the forest?
Until I output the mosaic this morning, I thought this question, new for 2019, was a dud. The forest here is dominated by Arbutus and Douglas Fir, both of which keep their leaves all year round, so I felt like answering this question in the journal was an endless series of looking out the window and picking out an identical shade of green.
But there actually are a few subtle seasonal events visible: in early spring, the yellow-green new growth, in late summer, the arbutus, having grown new leaves, drop the old ones (pale yellow) and then in early fall, their bark peels off in papery sheets (red-orange). In fall, the bigleaf maples drop their leaves (yellow) - we don't have many maples at home, but there are some on the way to work, and I recorded the swirls of leaves in the road a couple of times.
I really like how this one turned out, I think I'll keep it for 2020.

What colour am I?
A general mood question. It was a good year, and I was happy (green, blue, or purple) almost the entire year (yellow is bad, white is worse). Greyishness usually represents feeling tired, worn out, or introvert overwhelmedness, though, and I reported a lot of that.
I'm considering dropping this question for 2020. It doesn't typically show any interesting long term patterns, and my colour selections are somewhat arbitrary and not entirely meaningful. I don't have a whole chart in my head or anything, I just pick out a colour I feel like.

What colour is the Magic Rock?
The Magic Rocks are lab-grown alexandrite on pendants

juli and I both wear. Alexandrite changes colour in response to ambient light, via a mechanism that is explained at least four conflicting ways around the internet, so I'm not actually sure. Ours are purple-red shading through grey to greyish green. When we lived apart, we liked comparing the colours: matching stones, in different places, different colours.
This question was a dumb idea. I'm always indoors, and usually in the same room with the same lighting fixtures when writing in the visual journal, so if I check the Magic Rock then, it is always purple. Occasionally, I happen to have noticed it being green earlier in the day and remembered to write that down, but not often; it spends a lot more time purple than green. I like the way this set looks, but I will probably drop this question for 2020.

What colour is the light?
A subjective question about the weather. Dark and grey in winter, warm yellow in summer, how the weather feels and how it lies on the skin. New for 2019. I think I'll drop this one; It overlaps too much with what colour is the sky, and I like that one better.
I think this one has some errors in it; I'm pretty sure we did not have a magenta day followed by a lime green day, unless the sky was the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel. Or I forgot that one apocalypse we had.