Opposites attract…or, colors on the opposite side of the color wheel make each other “pop.” Hmmm….think I’d better upload a color wheel, hunh? OK…here you go, same as yesterday:

Look at the colors on opposite sides of the wheel….no matter which two colors you pick, as long as they are at the other end of a straight line on the other side of the wheel, they are complementary (note: this in not a compliment, which is a nice thing said about someone/thing!).

Christmas red and green are the classic example, so that’s what I used for my sample (though I may do a couple more of these using other “opposites”). On the back, I illustrated the concept with the straight line:

For the front, I used a “framed” composition, and just a smattering of reds and greens in different values…another color concept.

Value: in color theory, this means how light or dark a color is. White and yellow have a light value. Deep purple and black have a dark value. Medium gray is….ummm… duh…. medium.

If you use one of the “ruby beholder” type tools available in quilting colors, this is one way to determine if fabrics have similar or contrasting value, that is if they are lighter, darker or the same as each other. Another way to determine value is to lay an assortment of fabrics on a photocopier and make a black and white copy. It’s an easy way to determine if you will have sufficient contrast in your quilt (and only you can decide if you want a lot or a little).

Back to the sampler….using assorted values of red and green helps give some life to this piece, making it look like an impressionist garden (it’s that thing I have about representational art…I’m working on it!).

Another one of my wall quilts also illustrates a different set of complementaries on the color wheel: orange and blue. This is why everyone loves the screaming oranges of autumn…the stark contrast with the blue skies is a perfect complement:

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about Triadic / Primaries as a combination.

An analogy in writing is where you compare something–you relate them to each other: giving birth is like trying to shove a piano through a keyhole, is one example (which is a lot more fun than the SAT test “tree is to cone as ball is to circle”). In color, analogous colors are colors that relate to the ones on either side of them. Here’s a scan of page 31 in The Elements of Color by Johannes Itten, one of the classics of color analysis:

Primary colors are the ones we often associate with kindergarten and young kids, at least in the US: Red, Yellow and Blue. They are called “primary” because you need a fairly “pure” pigment to get those colors. Here, they are at noon, 4 pm and 8 pm on the wheel and in the very center.

Secondary colors are orange, purple and green; you can get those colors my mixing red and yellow, red and blue, or blue and yellow, respectively. By combining equal amounts of two primaries, you get a second, mixed color–they come second, after the “first” or primary colors.

Tertiaries are, then, the third colors. Take one of the secondary colors made of equal amounts of two primaries, than add more of one of the primaries. Using orange as an example, add red or yellow to make yellow-orange or red-orange.

Looking at your handy dandy color wheel, and sticking to with orange, you can get an anologous color run by looking at the colors on either side of orange: yellow-orange-red. Or, you can limit the color-run to the tertiaries, as in the example just given. For yellow, a similar color run would be yellow-green, yellow, and yellow orange. You can “bridge” the warm and cool colors by going through the greens: yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue. Or have a similar run on the blue side of the wheel: green-blue-violet.

For my “quiltlet” example, I used a primary / secondary color run: red-orange-yellow. Here’s the color-block side of things; I selected an arc to represent analogous colors, since they are side-by-side in an arc on the color-wheel:

And here is the “quilty” side of things (inspired by a wonderful ephemeral artwork by Andy Goldsworthy–I don’t remember which of his books it was in, but he whorled fallen autumn leaves around a hole dug into the earth….vibrant reds surrounded a seemingly black hole, then orange, then ochres and yellows, until you reached the brown bare Earth…here’s a link on the web to that picture , and on-line art site with pictures of his works, and a link to some of his books at Amazon. Here’s the quiltlet:

Obviously, the dominant composistional element is the circle. As before, I bordered the top with white, the bottom with black, and salted some medium-gray into the center. Try holding your hand or a piece of paper over the white border and see how that affects your perfection of the color. Now try blocking out the black border on the bottom. White mutes the color; black intensifies or makes the color more vibrant. Depending on what you want to do with the color—you can change the colors next to it to punch it up or tone it down.

If you’re interested in an academic approach to color, but one that isn’t too dense or daunting, head to the library (or Amazon) and look at The Elements of Color by Johannes Itten (still in print after all these years, and for a reason…). ISBN 0-442-24038-4. In the quilting world, an older book by Mary Coyne Penders, Color and Cloth, is very good at dealing with how to use the color in commercial prints, the way most of us work. Joen Wolfrom’s books, ColorPlay and The Magical Effects of Color, are outstanding, but may be a bit art / academic oriented for some readers, but I loved them. To jump up on the soapbox a bit….go ahead and learn the art world’s terminology….it’s just words. Learn the definitions, and you’ll be way ahead of the game, and you’ll understand better what you are looking at when you walk into the fabric store. If I can learn color, ANYone can!

The next concept is the one-color or monochromatic quilt. I chose blue since I have a lot of blue fabrics, but any color can be used. An achromatic quilt is monochromatic using shades of gray/black. Here, I chose a horizontal composition. I’ve tried VERY hard to work more abstractly since I prefer representational stuff, but I can’t seem to move away entirely. In my head, this is waves, shading from lighter at the top to darker at the bottom.

Here’s the back of the quilt–simple: white top, black bottom, solid medium blue in the center, with a number 1 as the symbol for this type of quilt.

The front of the quilt isn’t strictly monochromatic…some of my batiks had some blues that really ranged into the green area, but at least they are blue-green, and into the purples, but a very deep blue-y purple (or is it a purple-y blue?). This is one thing you have to contend with when working in commercial fabrics (as opposed to dyeing your own)….what you have in your stash or available for sale determines what you’ll have in your quilt. But you get the idea:

Some of the most striking traditional quilts are monochromatic. I fell in love with a Mariner’s Compass pattern by Mary K. Ryan that, a few eons ago (the 80s) appeared on the cover of Quilters’ Newsletter Magazine. That became my second quilt, and I still totally love it and the monochromatic color scheme:

But it seems to me that the majority of art quilts use other color principles. I know that monochromatic art quilts exist, but they seem to compose an even smaller percentage of the genre than in traditional quilts. What do you think?

And just because I couldn’t resist, and because this Mariners’ Compass quilt is probably one of maybe two full sized quilts I’ll ever quilt entirely by hand (the other will be my Dear Jane, if and when I ever get back to working on it….ahem), here are two close ups. The first is of the dolphin quilted into the front (there are also orcas). The second shot is of the white back, where you can see how much quilting there is…MILES!

Caz mentioned that the second photo worked better for her for illustrating the color principles, and that she ended up distracted by the shapes in the first “front” photo in my previous post. It occured to me that I should explain what I’m hoping to do with the pieces.

In writing or in a lecture, I would show the back “color block / color ‘principle'” side first…the main, solid, color blocks. Then I’d turn the quilt over to show what it would look like in a contemporary style quilt. A lot of times, folks can’t make the visual translation from solid color blocks (in paint or cloth) to cloth in a quilt. This is the only piece where I used the solid fabrics on the “front” / quilt side; in all the others I used batiks with some solids….I’ll post Monochromatic tonight, and maybe that will help illustrate where I’m going? Thanks for the tip, Caz…it helps me know how to explain things.

Addendum, July 22, 2006: Hi everyone! I’ve added a link on the sidebar to this post, which is the first of an extended series of tutorials on color. If you’d like to read the rest of the series, look in the sidebar to the right that says “Archives.” Click on February 2006, the scroll down to the 17th. Read from the bottom up to follow the posts in sequence. Thanks and cheers!

OK…you guys (presuming rashly that anyone is reading!) get to be my guinea pigs. This is the first of 9 or 10 posts in a series on color. I’d love feedback, so please read on!

Background: last fall I gave a talk for my local guild chapter, then a paid lecture for the Clamshell Quilters down the road a piece in Damariscotta, on Color for Quilters. I think the talks went reasonably well, and I was able to illustrate most of the concepts with my quilts, from journal to large wall sized. But, I decided what I really needed was some “show and tell” specifically geared to teaching quilters basic color theory. So…….I decided to make a series of two-sided journal quilts to illustrate various concepts. Just to get you reading, I’m putting one quiltlet here, but read below for details.

I started the talks like this:

Learning about color is a lot like learning about quilting. You need to learn the words so that you can understand what people are saying. How many of you know what a fat quarter is? (Virtually every hand in the room is raised.) How many of you know what a scant quarter inch means? (Ditto) And if I say a log cabin, do you think of a building in the woods, or a quilt? (guess what…) What about a Baltimore Album. I’m guessing folks are not thinking of a black vinyl disc played on an antique known as a record player. And I’m guessing they’re also not thinking about a photo album. We have all learned the words to explain quilty things.

Well, it’s the same thing for understanding color. If we define the words and illustrate them, including interpreting them in cloth, then they are easier to understand.

This post is about the first term: achromatic, which means without color or, more simply, black, white and shades of gray—something that lacks color. This photo is the back of the quilt (which isn’t actually quilted, yet…stay tuned!):
And the photo at the start of the post is a simple assortment of the black, white and gray sorta-square shapes. I decided to put white borders on the tops of all the pieces, black on the bottom, and tuck grey into the center portion to illustrate the effect of placing a “color” (or lack thereof) next to black, white and gray. You’ll see in future posts how the gray seems dark when placed next to yellow, but light next to dark violet. It’s the same gray in all of them…..

Anyway, I’d really appreciate feedback on these pieces as teaching tools. Stay tuned, keep reading, and let me know what you think. I want also to teach folks about using thread to manipulate the appearance of the color of fabric…more on that down the line.