Quilt Artists Guide to Color Session 6: The Interaction of Color

Well, hopefully, you've done all of the studies so far on the pages with your fabrics and or your paints. And you're getting a good understanding of the language surrounding color and the way we describe colors and the varieties of colors. The next step is actually playing with those colors in a way that allows them to interact with each other. And I wrote a book called "A Fiber Artist's Guide to Color & Design," and it has 12 really good lessons in the back of it. These workshops help you play with that interaction. And in a way that's kind of a setup from this is where you could begin, and this is where you should go next, and this is where you should end up. So it's a wise resource and a really great way to study color. You can do it with groups of people. You can do it on your own. You can use the book. You can use any book on color. Or you can use your color wheel. Now I've been referring to my fabric color wheel most of the time here. And that's great. It's a wonderful way for you to really learn about color. But one of the things that the printed color wheels have on them that your color wheel won't are some guidelines. And so I'm going to kind of talk about that here in the middle. You can read the back, and I highly suggest that you read everything that's printed on your color wheel so you understand what tools they gave you. But right now what's important is what's happening on the front of this color wheel. It has two triangles, a rectangle and a square, and each of those shapes in its corner has an arrow. And so when I point that arrow at colors, I'm putting together a particular type of combination. So on this color wheel, when I use the big, red triangle, it is showing me a triad. That's three colors, equidistant from each other, that form a good color combination. When I use the narrow triangle, that's doing a split complement. And that split complement is another type of combination of using color. When I use the square and each of those corners is pointing at a color, I am pulling together the colors that are in a tetrad. Those are four colors equidistant from each other. And when I use this rectangle, this color wheel is telling me that I'm also doing a tetrad, but from the classic color study I've done, I'm really doing, as far as I'm concerned, a double split complement. So this can help you do color studies. That means that you're putting the theories that you've learned, or the ideas or the language that you've learned, into practice and doing actual studies. What does that mean? Does that mean you have to make a quilt for every study? Maybe you decide to do that. You make that commitment to yourself. Or you're simply going to pull together fabrics from your stash and cut them up and put them together in combinations. And that's great too. But basically, if you really want to learn about color, you have to do it experientially. You have to get your hands on it. You have to play with those colors. So I've been playing with color combinations, classic color combinations, for more than 20 years. And I continue to play with these combinations because they work. So the very first thing I'm going to show you is the study of working with neutrals. Neutrals are working with anything in that grayscale. And then I also showed you that scale that went from the light off white to the brown, considered our neutrals also. In this piece, I've got the light browns and the blacks with some gray and little tiny accents of color. This wonderful yellow orange in here. I wanted to use little accents of color, and both of these neutrals have that, but I needed to make sure that those accents of color did not pick up any color in my neutral. So if I had browns that were very yellow-orange, then the whole thing would start to read as yellow-orange. So I chose browns that did not have yellow-orange in them. In fact, my browns have more of a pinky purpley cast to them. So here we have browns and blacks with lots of different visual textures. We've got fine lines next to each other, small to medium circles, little bits of mottling, tiny little leaves, more of that mottling again. Here we have stripes that are moving in opposite directions. So we have different types of visual texture that are helping to delineate space. Very simple little piece, nice exploration of value. Simply using lighter values with darker values. Whereas this piece has tons of value in it, and it has a really nice grayscale. if you will. It also has the accent color of red. And just enough red to say, "I'm here, but I'm not taking over." If you look at this Bargello section, you can see that we've got grays that start here at a medium to medium dark value and get lighter until they hit the black at white. And then the black is dark, and it gets lighter again. And we have that wonderful progression of value. And we're getting to see the value of the grayscale. When you're working in neutrals, one of the things that you're trying to do is to understand how color value, or lack of color, but value and visual texture is going to fill space. Once worked with the neutrals, I moved to monochromatic. Monochromatic means one color. So I can go to the color wheel and choose any one of these colors. And I can use all of its variety, its tints, tones, shades, pure hues and lights, medium, and dark of that color. So in this small piece, which I believe is oriented this way, this is red-violet, and it is the softer more tonal and more tinted version of red violet. There's no pure hue, and there's no shades. What we have here is a slight tint. So it's a little bit lighter than the pure hue, a little bit lighter than that. And lighter than that still with little bits of tones of the red-violet throughout. Got a little bit of black, which is a neutral playing with it. And tiny bits of gold, not yellow-orange, but actual gold, the metal. So it's a metallic feel. And this is a way of simply playing with the values and the color scale of one color to explore how it's going to affect space. Now, this next one sort of reads as one color, blue-green. But we see less little bits of other colors in there. But ideally, it is a good way of seeing the variety of blue-green. When I try to make this blue fabric here play with blue, it doesn't. It wants to act like it's something else. Because it's actually the dull version of this blue-green. In our background we've got more blue blue-green and more green blue-green. Because it's that tertiary color, that color made from a pure hue and a secondary, excuse me, a primary and a secondary, It has more play in it, so I can get more variety. And when I first look at this piece, I think, "Is it really just one color?" Well, pretty much, about 80% of it is blue-green. Then I get to direct complements. When we look at our color wheel, we're gonna see that we have pairs that play across, and we have all of of these options, six options of direct complements. The word complement here is not the word compliment that has an I in it. It's actually got two E's, and it comes from the word complete. Direct complements are said to complete each other. When you bring them together, they actually form grays, different varieties of grays, but they're basically canceling each other out. And so learning to work with direct complements is a lesson in managing the power of colors. We need to go back to that idea that we learned earlier about the inherent value of a color. The lighter inherent valued, bossy snotty-wotty, remember. Our darker inherent valued. They're weak, and they want to kind of go away. Our medium inherent values that play equally with each other. So when we're doing these in different combinations, we're going to use different amounts of the colors to yield a pleasing end result. A pleasing end result, it's so ambiguous. What I like somebody else may not like. But there are some great generalities. If we see a piece of artwork that has yellow and violet in it, and it's dominated by yellow, most people will not want to live with that piece, because the yellow becomes overwhelming. Whereas if it's dominated by the violet and accented with yellow, most people will like it because it makes them feel royal and happy at the same time. Color affects our emotions. And when we bring these colors together in interaction, it's going to affect our emotions too. So our first sample I'm going to show here is the direct complement of yellow-green and red-violet. Now yellow-green can be a bossy snotty-wotty color because it's light inherent valued, but I chose to use a toned tint, it means it's lighter than the pure hue, but it's also a little bit dirty, as my background. And it's sitting nicely in that background. Then I chose to use a very bright, almost pure hued red-violet, bring it up to the surface. And then a black and white that had a lot of visual texture in it. The only visual texture to perk that whole thing up. But then I added tactile texture. It's also visual, but that is the stitch line. Wrote some words, and then put some leaves in the background. And because I can feel those leaves, it becomes tactile texture, but because I can see it, it's also visual texture, and the two are working together. And in this direct complement, I forced something to happen that shouldn't happen. Because the yellow-green is lighter inherently, it should want to come forward. And the red-violet is darker inherently, it should want to recede, but because I chose a dull version of that yellow-green and quilted bejeebers out of it, it's sitting back where I wanted it. And a brighter, purer version of that red-violet, it's sitting up. But I top that red-violet with black and white, which has the highest contrast, which reads as pure energy, which draws your eyes to the center of those squares and pulls those squares to the surface. No matter how you play with color, we are quilters. And the quilting is going to affect what the color does. You cannot fight physics. The more heavily you quilt something, the more that something is going to recede. So keep that in mind. So I have almost no quilting here so that it can remain forward. Not a whole lot of quilting here so it can remain forward. And heavy, heavy quilting here so I can help push it back. This is another direct complement, and this is the direct complement of blue-violet and yellow-orange. Blue-violets are hard to come by. And a lot of people can't determine the difference between a blue and a violet and a blue-violet but this is blue-violet and yellow-orange. Now, when we see the color wheel here, we can see here that this is a much more orange yellow-orange. This yellow-orange here is not yellow. We can see the orange in it, but just a little tiny bit, but it's enough to make it no longer yellow. Here I'm again playing with things and making them behave differently than they should because of the quilting. This yellow-orange band should be coming forward because it's yellow-orange, but I quilted it very heavily, about every eighth of an inch. And I physically set this blue-violet on top of it. I didn't piece it in so that it was sitting on the same surface. I physically applicated on top so that it could physically occupy that space on top. And it has a tactile texture to it. So it is thicker and it's raised. So I'm doing all the things I could to bring that color on top and make it sit on top and not fall down into this yellow-orange and get lost. So we can use all of these other tools in addition to the color to manipulate things and make them behave differently. Heavy quilting pushing this area back. A lighter inherent value, so it's coming forward a bit more than this background space, and it's holding its own against this very light inherent color of yellow-orange. And now we have a complex complement, one of my favorite pieces, and this is a split complement. We have yellow-green, or, excuse me, a double complement. Yellow-green and yellow with violet and red-violet. Now, I've had lots of people say, "Where's the yellow?" Well, that would be here. All of this color that reads as olive is yellow with black added. And I know it's yellow with black added because I painted this on silk, and I have been playing with this limy color, which is a yellow green, and it was overwhelming things. And so I added black to the yellow green, and I did not like the color. It was too dirty. So I went back to just yellow, added a little bit of black, and got this perfect shade of yellow to play in here. And it's on every one of the scarabs. So we have yellow with yellow-green, and red-violet and violet. A wonderful combination. And those colors are working with each other. They're playing off of each other to provide an interaction that is very, very attractive. What we're doing, though, is keeping things kind of unequal. I took the darker inherent value colors and put it on two backgrounds, and that lighter inherent value color and put it on only one background, except this whole background is also yellow. It is the same as this yellow here only duller. It has gray added to it instead of black. And it is the dullest of all of the fabrics. And therefore it's sitting on that background really well. And because this is darker and brighter, it's coming forward more. It's also physically sitting on top of. These are little quilts on top of another quilt. So that physicality adds to that sense of coming forward too. So this is a double complement, two colors next to each other, yellow-green and yellow, and they're direct complements of violet and red-violet. Which leads to one of the things that most of us do a lot of, which is the analogous runs. To be analogous, we need to be alike, 'cause the word analogous comes from analogy, which means to be alike. So we need to have at least three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. We can't skip a color in an analogous run. An analogous run can be three colors, four colors, five colors, six colors, or seven colors. However, that being said, it cannot contain more than one primary. And so that's where the difficulty lies in really long analogous runs. The reason it can't contain more than one primary is because red shares nothing in common with yellow, Red shares nothing in common with blue, and blue shares nothing in common with yellow, and blue shares nothing in common with a red. So they are not alike. They have nothing in common with each other. So how do I get to seven then? Well, if I link one side of my hand on one primary and touch the next primary, I block out those two primaries and the colors in between. I'm left with seven colors, and the other primary will be the middle. So here is the primary red, and I can include red-violet, violet, and blue-violet because red is in blue-violet, but red is not in blue. I can include red-orange, orange, and yellow-orange because red is in yellow-orange, but not in yellow. So all of these colors have something in common with each other, and they simply go from one to the other and make a beautiful transition. A lot of us have been quilting in analogous colorways and never even knowing it. They're very soothing. Well, because they're very soothing, they can quickly become quite boring, not very interesting at all. So this piece is an analogous colorway, a very short one, and you can see it very quickly when I put the color wheel next to this. It's yellow, yellow-green, and green with the addition of the neutral of white. If I did not have a lot of other things going on with this, it would be boring, but I have some wonderful visual and tactile texture in my negative space, and visual and tactile texture in my squares. I have squares that are playing against a much more natural feel of the leaves, which is also playing against this wonderful texture of this bit of vintage tatting, and this wonderful physical, tactile texture of this wonderful fraying fabric, and some more velvet here. There's just texture abounding, both tactile and visual. So that's what's pushing this design moreso than the color, the short, short analogous run. Things become more interesting if we expand that analogous run. So here you can see that what I've blocked out and what I've kept. What I've blocked out is the yellow and the red and gone like so. So one side of the hand on one primary, the other finger's on the other. So none of this can play. And I've got yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, blue-violet, violet, and little hints of red-violet, just little bits of it here and there. All of these colors have blue in common. There's blue in yellow-green because it's made with green, and there's blue in red-violet because it's made with violet. So this is a very long analogous run. And because it's a long run, and we have a greater variety of colors, then I can do more repeat. I've repeated the same block over, repeated another block over. Though it's got lots of great interest, I didn't have to rely on a whole lot of other things to give me the interest, because I have such a wonderful play of color doing that. I've got lights, mediums, darks, pure hues, tints, tones, and shades all working together in all seven of those colors. But because I haven't skipped any colors, and I haven't had any colors that don't have that blue in common, it reads very harmoniously. And that's what analogous colorways do. So the next area of study is triads. If you have your color wheel, that's the printed color wheel, that triad is going to be found when you point any of the corners of the large, red triangle on any three colors. Blue, yellow, and red is one option. And then we turn it, and our next option is red-orange with yellow-green and blue-violet. People don't do that option very often. Another common option, though, is the orange with green and violet. And then the final option is going to be what people call the Florida combination, yellow-orange, blue-green, and red-violet. So here we have violet-orange and green. It's dominated by the violet. Then we have dull, dull orange playing in there too. And then we have our green. So our orange is this dull version somewhere in between these two. Our greens are also dull. And our violet is the lighter, brighter a little bit so that that violet doesn't get ignored, which so often happens. And here's our classic of the primaries of red, yellow, and blue. Very easy to play with because we're so used to seeing it. We think of that primary school color thing. But trying to put it together in a way that is pleasing and let the yellow not overwhelm. I added white so that the white would calm that yellow down, because white is even brighter and bolder than yellow. And the blue, I tried to use as pure a hue as I could and put it right in that middle so it got some good attention. In the red, I tried to change up the motion. Here we have lines. Here we have lines, and here we have circles. So that that changing up that motif adds visual interest. So those are triads. Another good part of the color wheel to study, the interaction of those three colors that are equidistant from each other on the color wheel and how they come together and behave with each other. Our last area to study would be the tetrads, and those are four colors equidistant from each other on the color wheel. And if you have a color wheel that has these tools on the front, then it's going to be the square. And each corner of the square is going to tell you the colors in that combination. What's interesting about this is that you're going to end up with two pairs of direct complements in your combination. Our first option is going to be green with red-violet and blue and orange. Very lovely combination, we see it pretty often. The next one is going to be the yellow-orange with green, blue-violet and red. And we don't see this combination very often, but I'm gonna show it to you in just a minute. And then the final option is going to be our yellow with blue-green, and violet and red-orange. And that one we see a little bit too. A lot of people are afraid of using these tetrads, because that's a lot of energy to manage, and they'll be off by one color. And so they'll have three of them and not the fourth. In the fourth, they'll have a color that's to one side or the other. This little guy here is the combination of red and green with blue-violet and yellow-orange, but it's all very very dirty. It's tones and shades. So when we come in here, we see that our reds are in this family and our greens are in here. And then when it comes to our blue-violets, much dirtier than what we have present here. And our yellow-orange definitely here in the dirty realm. So it's mostly tones. You don't have to match your color scale all the time, but when you're working with the divergent colors, like in a tetrad, bringing that color scale together will help make the piece a little bit more harmonious. I highly suggest that you choose some of these classic color combinations, and play with them, either with fabric or with paper, by making actual projects or by making mock-ups. It's learning experientially that is going to help you in this process. I also highly suggest that you go back and look at your more successful quilts, the ones that make your heart sing, and determine what color combination they're using. Chances are it lies in one of those combinations on the color wheel. And the reason why it looks so good is because those colors work together really, really well.