Category: Theory

How to Use Blue: A Follow Up (VIDEO)

Posted on February 10, 2020May 30, 2023 by Brook Thornley

As a follow-up to more of the questions we received regarding our January blog posts about the color blue, Brook has created a short video to help you know the different ways you can use blue, and how to keep it in your own design.

For an even more in-depth video about the color blue, log-in to the Human Art Classroom where you can watch a discussion with Brook about what blue means, how it affects us, and how we can use it in our daily lives. Not a member yet? Click here to sign up! Get exclusive videos and downloads, and access to any new content we add!

We hope you enjoy learning more about blue, and remember, everyone is a masterpiece!

Feeling Blue? But Which Shade of Blue?

Posted on January 27, 2020May 30, 2023 by Brook Thornley

After the last blog post about using the color blue, we had a lot of questions come in about which blue a person should pick for themselves. “Do I pick a Saturated, Whitened, Grayed or Blackened blue if I’m going to surround myself with blue this season?”

In answer to that, here are two questions to ask yourself when you are picking any color.

Are you drawn to it?
Does it make you feel inspired when you put it close to you?

Are you drawn to it? If it were in a store, is it one of the first colors you see when you walk in, before you start to consider other options? Because we crave color, the color we are craving will grab our attention first and it will leave an impression. Pay attention to the impressions in our mind (or out loud) that pop up when we first see that particular color. That is good information.

Does it make you feel inspired when you put it close to you? We’ve talked about how sometimes we are drawn to our opposite; the same applies in color. Sometimes we are drawn to a color because it is our opposite. If that color were a person, we would want to take it to dinner and have a great conversation with it. That’s why you try it on. If it is a piece of wardrobe, like a shirt, it will feel frumpy on us if it is not our design. If it is something we want around us the feeling won’t be quite as dramatic, but will still have the same effect, so again just pay attention to the impressions it leaves when you put it close; that will tell you a lot.

Remember that we have all four of the designs in us, so we will want a little of all of them at one time or another, so pay attention to what is truly inspiring us in that moment.

Also remember that everyone is a masterpiece!

Brook

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Jan. 14, 2020 – Are You Feeling Blue?

Are You Feeling Blue?

Posted on January 14, 2020May 30, 2023 by Brook Thornley

One of the top trend colors this season is BLUE. You can spread it through your life this trend season and it will bring peace and creativity. You can use it in wardrobe, home interior, cooking and, most importantly, it is a great color to add to your self-care routine.

The color blue promotes introspection, and when we surround ourselves with it, it takes our thoughts all the way to the end of their true intention. It tends to block defenses and fear so we can finish a thought process in whatever way our particular thought process works.

Blue is also calming and is intangible. It can promote creativity in task, in artistry, and emotional creativity.

One trick you can use to enhance the power or experience of blue in your life is to couple it with orange. Orange will enhance the properties of the color blue. If it is accompanied by any orange it will boost the blue’s effect.

In your wardrobe you can add just a little orange to your blue through an accent. Remember the rule that the more intense the blue, the more subdued the orange should be, or vice-versa. You don’t want the two competing.

In your surroundings just make sure that there is more blue than orange to enhance the effects of the blue. Otherwise you will be enhancing the color orange and you will create the opposite effect.

So if you are “feeling blue,” go out and find ways to surround yourself with the color blue this season!

Remember, everyone is a masterpiece.

Brook

Human Art vs. Other Personality Tests: The Point of All This is You

Posted on February 25, 2019May 30, 2023 by Brook Thornley

*Painting by Donna O. Kearney, one of the original researchers of Human Art, and mother of Brook Thornley*

Just like anything else that is worth diving into, knowing and understanding one’s personality is a critical part of building a good, strong sense of self. It is an important part of learning how to support oneself. I love the business of personality profiling. It brings me an incredible sense of joy. One of the biggest reasons for that is, with every interaction or discovery of someone’s personality, on the other side of me and my responsibility to work hard for an individual to put their equation together is a human being. A person with many layers, with a story or perhaps many stories. A person with some level of independence and a functioning autonomy that is where I see the human spirit. We all have that in common. We all seem to be hungry for more clues into who we are, how we are made, and what authentically rings true to each of us in a way only we, as that individual, understand.

That responsibility is what I would like to focus on. Once you understand at any level who you are, it is your responsibility to move forward in life from the inside out. Keeping the good in and the bad out. Going into each day with those traits as a security and using them to the best of your ability. I see far too many times we human beings forgetting to look inside for our worth and instead looking to others to give it to us. It leaves us feeling lonely; lonely for someone. That someone is you – your authenticity.

I remember discussing this very thing with my father when our book, Human Art: Understanding your own Personal Design* first came out. My family is a large family of artists. My dad was a painter but a commercial artist by trade. Beautiful art was so important to him but so were words. He talked about the emotions that came up when he read the “forward” of the book. It was a plea of sorts to move “forward” as a human race. He said he had discussed this with some of his friends. He talked to me about how someone of his age could take these words in and look at each individual in that way.

I have a beautiful piece of white paper with one word on it that my father scribed with ink and pen by hand, hanging in my home. It is one word and to me it really does tell a story of each human being if you look deep enough. INCREDIBLE.

I, like my father, did believe every human is incredible. We owe them a deeper look—to find authenticity. We also owe ourselves that courtesy. Stop looking from the outside in with a script of what you think you should be. Start looking from the inside out and find your place in this world, your place authentically.

Find a word or an attribute, a simple trait that you believe about yourself—it could be anything—and hold on to it. Move FORWARD in a way only you can. Live in that way, love with understanding for each other, discover new things with an attitude of celebration and tolerance for others’ authenticity. We all deserve that because everyone is a masterpiece.

Brook

To learn more about Human Art, the history, and where it came from, visit our website: https://theoriginalpersonalitytest.com/about/welcome

*The book “Human Art: Understanding Your Own Personal Design” by Brook and Rod Thornley is currently out of print. We are hoping to offer a 2^nd Edition in the future. We will keep you posted!

Human Art vs. Other Personality Tests: Sensing vs. Intuitive

Posted on February 19, 2019May 30, 2023 by Brook Thornley

Picture yourself in a directive situation. It could be a classroom setting, or in a lecture, or possibly even listening to a video. What do you imagine you are doing? How is the information affecting you? More importantly, how are you taking it in or experiencing it? What dynamics come up? How aware are you of what is going on with your senses, and how much do you intuitively take in? Most self-report tests measure you in one or the other – sensing or intuition. At Human Art we look at both.

“It’s hard to separate sensing and feeling. For example, we all think in the here and now, but we can’t help but consider the possibilities of the future.”
-Rod Thornley, Clinical Director of Human Art

Children are a great example of this dynamic. You can watch them experience life and see this sensing and intuition happening. We have a pond near our home. It is in the center of a park and it is large. It has a bridge and many paths around it. The children in the neighborhood love to go there in the summer and catch frogs. They study them and then throw them back. Every once in a while, a child will do as the others do and take their bucket to the park and join in with the others catching frogs and observing them; then it occurs to them that they want to take it home. Let’s break down what happens just prior to them getting home, mom seeing the frog, and the well-known, and expected, march back to the pond to return the frog to his home.

The child might experience the frog by taking him out of the bucket. The sensing part will kick in first. The child will take the frog in his hands and feel the slime that coats the frog, he might sense the smell of the pond in the area around the frog. He moves on to how any mud left on the frog’s skin slithers around on his hands and makes it difficult to hold on to the frog.

It is at this point he moves to the intuitive part of his experience. It might occur to him right then that his mom might not be happy with the new member of the family that the child brings home. He might be wondering how the frog is going to like his home. He is now thinking intuitively by processing what could happen in the future.

We all have and experience both sensing and intuition. Depending on how we are made up, our design or our personality is how each of us would respond to the frog situation as a child. Some might think intuitively first, before the sensing experience. Others might alternate between the two very quickly and often. The important thing to remember is that we have both and we all have different degrees. So as unique as each human is, is how unique we will experience life and move in and out of sensing vs intuition. The point is to learn how you do it and then support yourself in it.

Your call to action today is to really evaluate how you do it. You would ask yourself in any given situation, “what would I do?” “How long do I stay in each?” Use your relationship with yourself. Have “self-talk” and learn to collect information from yourself in an honest way; not to please or impress others, but to really get to know yourself. Then take a step toward supporting yourself. Use this information as you better collaborate with others. It could be as simple as explaining the frog dynamic. You might find yourself standing up for yourself and really learning to love yourself.

You are unique, you are one of a kind. So is your neighbor, and whoever you interact with in a given day. Celebrate you, celebrate others, and remember everyone is a masterpiece.

Brook