Quilt Artists Guide to Color Session 5: All About the 12 Colors

Now we're to the point where I would like to help you really understand each of the 12 colors. We've kind of got an overview of where those 12 colors fall on the color wheel. What makes them different from each other. We can look at the color wheel and we can see that we've got a wheel of pure hues, a wheel of tints, a wheel of tones, a wheel of shades, and we put it in whatever order we wanted to do it. Hopefully you've either painted one out or done it with fabric. And now I highly suggest that you do a full page of each color and you can do it with fabric, especially if you separate all your stash out by color, it'll be easier, or you can do it with paint. And I'm gonna show you what I did with paint here so that you can get an understanding of how the color scale, the addition of white gray and black, can really, really change a color. And it's gonna be a little bit more complex than the colors that we've put on our color wheel. I'm gonna start by mentioning the gray scale. And again, the gray scale is beginning with white and ending with black. And as we do this, you'll notice that none of this is on the color wheel. There is no white, gray or black on the color wheel. This is not a color. White is the essence of pure light and black is the absence of light. And all of the varieties of gray in between are a mixture of light and no light. So here I've done a 12 step color wheel, I think one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 step color gray scale. And you can do a 20 step gray scale if you want to, you could do a six step gray scale, whatever it is you want to do. But what you're basically gonna do is start with white and end with black and put as many varieties of gray as you can in between going from lightest to darkest. So I simply started with my white, painted that, then went to my black and painted that, and then started adding little bits of white painted it a little bit more white, painted it a little bit more white, painted it and so on. Hoping that I got a nice step up of white added in there but I think it's important to do a gray scale. So either do that with paint or do it with fabric. And now we're gonna talk about the 12 colors and we're gonna start with yellow. Yellow is one of those colors that people have a really hard time understanding and it is a color that is inherently light. It is also considered to be one of the happiest colors. It's hard to be unhappy in the presence of yellow. However pure hued yellows will start to irritate very quickly. So painting a room pure hued yellow is not a good idea. In fact, if you put a couple of husband and wife in a bright yellow room, usually they're fighting within about 10 minutes because it over stimulates. But when we use these nice light versions, these tints of yellow, it's very happy and wonderful. When we start adding gray to yellow it becomes very dirty, very quickly and it goes to these wonderful dull olive colors. And then when we start adding black to it, it gets dark and very green and very, very deep olive avocadoy. And yellow changes a lot because it's so inherently light. It changes a lot. So we have to pay attention to that when we're color mixing. If you're gonna do this in fabric you're gonna be challenged because there aren't a whole lot in this light variety here because the color is so close to white, that when we add white, very little tiny amounts are going to make differences, but then we go paint them out or go to choose those fabrics, it's hard to determine those difference, because there's so much pure light in yellow. That is because it has more energy than any other color. The yellow orange, a mixture of yellow and orange. So yellow here, our next color is yellow orange, and it's a tertiary color it's made by mixing a primary and a secondary. And so it has a lot of play. You get to choose which variety of yellow orange you're going to use, one that's as close to the two colors mixed evenly as possible, one that's slightly more yellow, one that's slightly more orange or a mixture of all of those. But here we have that yellow orange in the pure hue, tints with white added, tones with gray added, and shades with black added. Would you have ever looked at a piece of fabric that is this color? Kind of an army fatigue color and thought that it was a shade of yellow orange? Most people would never and they'd argue with me about it. But this is what happens when black is added to yellow orange. So painting these out is one of the most amazing learning experiences you'll ever have. Trying to find this in fabric is gonna be an amazing experience too, but might be a little bit more frustrating. It's a little harder to do. And now we have our orange. Remember earlier I said that when we add black to orange, it becomes brown. So here we have our orange. Our pure hue, tints with less white and more white, tones, more gray, and then shades, more black, ending in our wonderful brown. Orange and red orange are the colors of rebirth. They make us feel like things are happening anew and that's because it's the color of autumn. And that's when everything's dying away and going into this dormant stage. But red orange is a very high energy color but it's very soothing. It hasn't got the bossiness of that yellow but it hasn't got the boldness of red. It's got a softening of those coming together and it's a very energetic and wonderfully powerful but not overwhelmingly powerful color. Our red orange here has quite a bit of red in it, probably more red than orange. And as we're playing with us, we can see that we get this melony color in our tint form. And then we get this wonderful kind of dirty bricky colors. And when our black is added, we go into the burgundy and here there's so much black added that you can barely see the red in this darkest shade. And then we get to the pure red, the red that is the red of the primaries. And so yellow, our next primary is red here. And we're seeing it in its light versions. We're seeing that melon color here, and it's a little bit pinker than the melon that we had of the red orange. And then when we add our gray to it, we can actually see that we're thinking, ooh that's going into that purpley look, but it's really not. It's just the gray being added to it that's dulling its energy. And then these wonderful, deep dark burgundies when we get into the shades of red. Now red is a very bold color. It's the color of life, blood. And it's very, very hard to manage sometimes in its pure hues. But when we see it in its rich rich shades, it's quite nice to work with. Which takes us to our next tertiary color of red violet. And red violet again is a mixture of a primary and a secondary, this case red and violet. And I have chosen a red violet that it was as close to the middle of the two as I could. And again, we have that pure hued red violet and then we have the tints and here you're gonna see that bubble gum pink that we were taught red was but really it's red violet. Then what happens when we add gray. And again, it goes to that almost violety feel. And what happens when we add black, the shades. And we can see how dark these shaded corners are getting as our colors are getting more inherently dark. Which takes us to our violet, and our violet is our shrinking color. And when you look at this portion here, it almost looks smaller on the page to me. Our pure hue, white added with our tints, grays added, and you can see how great becomes very, very quickly. You lose its color very quickly because it's the darkest inherent value color. And as we add black, this was the most difficult thing I ever did. And these paints would look so different from each other when they were wet and then when they would dry they would be so similar. And it was so hard to try to get that subtle variation because the darkness of that value just sucked up that black and made it dark instantly. And now we're gonna head away from the darkest back into the lighters. And we go to the blue violet, we'll turn this around here. And our blue violet here. Our pure hues, adding white. What happens when we add gray? Now, when we add that gray, it gets dull very quickly. Now, blue violet and blue are colors that are very loved. People think, well, often say that blue is their favorite color, violet is their favorite color and blue violet in between. And it's because it makes us feel peaceful. And at the same time valued, which is interesting because we've been taught without even knowing we've been taught that the royals are those colors that make us feel like we're important, whether it's royal blue or the royal violets. Unfortunately with blue, when we start to deplete it of its light and it gets dull it can also get depressing. And some people can find these duller tones of violet and blue violet and blue to be kind of depressing. So we have to be careful of how we use those. And again, here we have the shade and as we add that black we get to that wonderful color that we call navy which is a shade of blue violet, usually, sometimes it's a shade of blue. And here we have our blue. Again, the pure hue, tints, tones, and shades. And look how deep and dark and enrich those are when we add all that black to that blue to the blue. Blue-green is a medium inherent value color, we're moving towards the light. Here we have our pure hue of the blue-green with our tints the white added with the tones, and again, with the shades. And this is just such a wonderful way to understand how these colors change so drastically as we change that color scale. Green is a big one for me. The tones of green are the things that we use quite a bit of. It's a wonderful medium value color. And so it can be used really nicely. However, if we don't use it properly, those greens can overwhelm. So if we put greenery around flowers and it's these brighter, pure hues, they're gonna stand up a part of those flowers. If we use these duller tones, they're gonna sit behind it and look like those leaves are playing around flowers. So we can use that color scale to our benefit. And then finally the yellow green, and again the yellow green with the pure hue, the tints with the white added, the tones with the gray added, and the shades with the black added. Wonderful, wonderful deep avocados, but not olives. Olives are that dark version of yellow. So please either paint these out or use fabric from your fabric stash. You might have to go do a little bit of shopping to get as many fabrics as you need and put these together on blank cover white paper. This is a downloadable if you want to use my way of putting it out. And so you can download this actual blank empty thing and use it to paint with if you want to. All right, next we're gonna see how this stuff really works on fabric.