Just reposting this, for those of you who might have missed my midweek Creative Nudge newsletter:

A few days ago I was blessed by the presence of a beautiful raptor in front of our house. I went out to get in my car in the driveway, and I noticed a neighbor out in the street waving his arms, pointing, and whispering loudly " Look in the tree!" In my adjacent neighbors' front yard was this huge raptor just sitting on a low branch looking at me. On the ground was its mate, eating its prey.

I *always* have at least a small camera tucked in my purse, so I breathlessly pulled out my little camera and snapped several photos. After posting on Facebook the consensus seems to be that it is a Coopers Hawk.

There is a Native American belief that everyone has an animal totem that represents their true nature, or an animal will appear to you to give you a message. I have a short list of wild animals that appear to me regularly (foxes and blue herons), and then there are the ones that appear like messengers. I am still contemplating what a Coopers Hawk might mean for me, but it was definitely one of those special moments where I was able to capture the essence of the bird in this image.

If you read the last issue of Fabric Trends magazine, you know that I like to take photos and then turn them into color palettes. It took me a few days to realize that I could turn this image into a color palette. (duh!) I happened to do this one in Photoshop – all of the swatches on the right were pulled directly from the photo with the eyedropper tool.

The point I am trying to make here is that inspiration is all around us, and sometimes we have to be hit over the head with a creative or color inspiration before we get it. I've been looking at this photo for 4 days – because I knew there was something there for me – but that's how long it took until the inspiration arrived like a bolt of lightning.

Nature is an incredible source of color and design inspiration. I take photos of all sorts of crazy things like rocks on the side of a highway, rotting leaves, and the surface of water. It is my library of textural ideas. Of course it is great fun to capture things like snowy peaks, fiery sunsets, and wildlife…but sometimes the biggest "aha!" is in the smallest closeup detail.

I am teaching my kids to see not only the beauty in Nature, but all the variety of colors in the world around us. Sometimes driving home at sunset, we'll park by the airport, look at the sky, and identify all the colors we see in the sky. Learning to really see Color takes time. You have to sit and look at the tree or the sky or the mountain, and erase all of your preconceived notions about the sky being blue, the tree being green, etc. Then you can begin to open your eyes to see like Monet or the other Impressionist painters…to see the purple in the shadows, the yellow in the highlights, the sparkle of red when the sun falls on dark hair, and fifty shades of pink on the petal of a rose. It's pure visual poetry, and it's all right there in front of us.

In the image above, the first 2 colors come from the plumage, the blue is from the thin crust of snow on the top of the branch, the gold is from the bird's legs, and the charcoal is from the tree branch. It was all there….it just took me awhile to really *see* what was there.