Tag: TurningTheKalideascope

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Unlocking thinking – try out all the colours in your palette

This week I’ve been writing about how artists, engineers (and other humans) build up a professional palette of techniques and forms from which they can develop new ideas. These are the colours they paint with

Having assembled our paint set, this palette lends itself well to a reliable technique for unlocking thinking. 

What people tell me time and again in workshops is that it isn’t having the first idea that they struggle with. It’s coming up with the second. Or having a new idea when the first one gets rejected. That’s when thinking becomes blocked. (There’s reasons for this blocking, which we can explore in another post).

That’s when I suggest systematically using the colours in your palette. 

If we were using a real paint palette, it would simply involve doing a quick sketch with the red paint, then the orange, then the blue, say. A quick doodle to see what the thing could look like in each of these colours.

For a structural engineer designing a span: what would this look like if it were a simple beam?

A cantilever? 

An arch?

A truss? 

Or what would the structure look like made from stone?

Timber?

Concrete?

Steel?

Each material and form has its own affordances — what you can and can’t do with it. 

If you know your colours, the cognitive load of doing five two-minute sketches is low. And that small effort can unlock the second idea. And it allows you to see your first idea in context — as the first in a family of possibilities. 

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Cobalt blue and cadmium yellow

One of my highlights of my year studying engineering in France was a module I did on Impressionist painting and engineering. We explored how the artists of that period were fascinated by the new railways that were arriving in cities—the light, the smoke, the transformation of the cities and the access to the countryside, where they would ride to and paint. 

But before they could catch a train, they had to assemble their paints.

The Impressionist period was time of innovation in paint technology. Alongside traditional natural pigments — ochres and siennas, derived from iron-oxide rich clays — new synthetic pigments became available in vibrant colours like cobalt blue and cadmium yellow.

For me this idea of creating your palette is a necessary precursor to creative work. It is both an enabling process and an ongoing one. 

The metaphor applies wherever we make something from something else. A jazz musician creates solos from the scales they’ve practised for years. Those scales give the music its flavour. A swing dancer practises individual moves so that they can weave them in when the moment is right in the music. A building designer chooses from a palette of materials, developing confidence in how to work with them, combine them, and bring out their best.

The more colours you have in your palette, the greater the number of combinations you can create. The better you know the colours in your palette, the more confidently and creatively you can work.