THE MOST COLORFUL PARTY EVER MADE
Jenny Lee, my client, came up with this most brilliant idea I’ve ever heard: why don’t we make a Rainbow-themed party? Now at the start this might seem like a bad idea: how do you create a whole party based on the single concept of “rainbow”?
The thing I love about event styling is the freedom you have to dream up the complete details of every party. What colors will you use? What’s the story you’d like to convey? What material to use for the stage? Do we employ graphic arts, or more furniture, or both? And the list goes on and on.
So having a theme based on a single element – rainbow – can be liberating in a sense. Since you begin with just a central concept, it is a blank canvas, and there is much room for “telling the story” the way you want it to be told.
My whole approach to Kaius’ party is simple: kiddie parties are meant to be celebrated IN FULL COLOR.
COLORFUL, BUT NOT TACKY
The enemy of a stylist is tackiness, chaos, and simplistic, mindless, let’s-put-all-our-props-just-because-we-can mentality. So the most obvious potential pitfall for a party centering around ROYGBIV is the risk of being tacky (or in the Filipino language, “baduy”).
My solution to this is problem is twofold – 1.) incorporating the color white to add some uniformity and a main “theme” to the multitude of colors, and 2.) putting in more thought into the design process and adding concepts to make the theme “rainbow” more multi-dimensional, concepts such as painting, and clouds, and the sky.
For example in the above photo, you’ll notice the line, “Let’s paint a rainbow”. So it’s not just plain simple “rainbow” anymore. There’s the element of painting, which is an activity that most kids love to do. Take a look at the cute paint brush on the upper right corner of the photo above too!
So, since there are paint brushes, there should be paint buckets too! The Party Magic team painted cute faces on the buckets.
Rainbow, painting, and an additional element is also introduced in the above photo – crayolas! All of these elements surround this cute little boy in a paint-splattered apron.
What about the ceiling treatment? That’s the easiest part actually. Rainbows appear in the sky, so I decided to put felt clouds, ROYGBIV colored bunting flags, hot air balloons, dark colored lanterns (for contrast), and cotton clouds with ROYGBIV ribbons hanging down, all set against a white swag backdrop:
I left the best element for last: my favorite, ROYGBIV felt drops hanging from a transparent umbrella!
When the guests arrived, they were greeted with this sight:
This is a new element I’ve been experimenting on: the rainbow-hued paper fan accordion! It sets a nice touch to the gray colored brick towers as an entrance welcome.
I also love how the photo-op turned out:
Again: how do you expand the topic of rainbows to cover an entire party? Here I worked tassels, a huge rainbow, clouds, lamp posts, and colorful stars, all set against a clean white brick wall background!
This is my favorite element of the photo-op: ROYGBIV raindrops!
The above shot was a fluke. I was messing around with the angles in my camera and chanced upon this fantastic angle! Welcome to Kaius’ Birthday Party!
And last but not the least, here is my interpretation of a rainbow themed dessert station:
The happiest of birthdays to you, dear Kaius!
Love,
Michelle
