A Lesson in Color

 

This was the last photo in yesterday's post. I have marked it up to show the areas that I think need work. If you look at them, you will see they are darks that are clumped together. I talk all the time about being wary of too many darks close together. 

Notice I said DARKS, not color. I'm going to give you a Big Hint. Pay attention. This is IMPORTANT. 

Value Supersedes Color.

You can say it another way. Value beats color. Whenever you design a quilt, I don't care what the COLORS are, the VALUES are more important. 

Every color has several properties. 

Hue is the actual color (Red, Yellow, Green, etc.) 

Value is the lightness or darkness. There is LIGHT BLUE and DARK BLUE. This is value. 

Intensity is the brightness. Do not confuse Intensity with Value. Think of an Orange. A real orange you eat. That's pretty much a true Orange color. That is Orange at its most pure, it's most intense. If you think of a light orange color, it isn't as bright. It has lost its intensity. A light orange isn't as intense as a real orange, neither is a dark orange. which gets closer to the color brown. Any time a color moves away from itself, it loses intensity. A lemon (a real one) is about as true to a true yellow as you can get. Because Yellow is so LIGHT (value) it loses its intensity pretty quickly. Yellow has a narrower range of value than a darker color, like blue, red or violet (purple).

OK, back to the quilt. In the areas that are circled in the photo above, the blocks are too close in VALUE so they make a dark blob. I do not like dark blobs, so I will have to break those apart.

The photo above shows my changes.

In the group at the upper right, I replaced the red block under the purple one with an orange one and switched the black one with the light green that was above it.

Moving to the left, I replaced a dark green block with a lighter green one.

On the far left, I swapped the pink and red blocks that were on top of the black one.

In the bottom group, I replaced the red block with a pink one.

This wasn't as easy as it sounds. EVERY color is affected by the color it is next to. Since each block has FOUR neighbors, I had to be careful not to create another dark area or a too light area. And since my own personal rule for this quilt was not to have two blocks of the same color sitting next to each other, it got complicated. 

I had made 12 different kinds of blocks: Yellow, Orange, Pink, Light Green, Dark Green, Red, Light Blue, Dark Blue, Light Violet, Dark Violet, Black, and Light blocks. In some cases I had to rearrange neighboring blocks to get the design the way I wanted it to look.

One note: In the camera, things always look a bit darker. The camera lens is not quite as sensitive as the human eye when it comes to distinguishing value. That can be an advantage for a real person, because the camera will often "pick up" a subtlety the human eye may miss. I can't tell you the number of times I have thought a quilt looked good, only to be reviewing the photo on my way OUT of the studio and see something I missed in real life.

These little blocks often became what I call "shape shifters" because while when I held one in my hand and thought it would be perfect for an empty spot, I'd put it there and suddenly it would look wrong, and I'd have to try a different block.

Yes, in some cases I went back to my sewing machine and custom made a block to fit into a particular spot.

How do I work this out when I design a quilt? I put the blocks where I think I want them to go, then I go across the room, take my glasses off (I am nearsighted) and look at the quilt. Sometimes I squint. I am not interested in the color at that moment, I am interested in the VALUE. 

Because of this I am very careful where I place my COLORS. I am always conscious of Value first. COLOR placement is secondary. I can think of two common color combinations where quilters get tripped up all the time: Red and Blue (often in red, white and blue quilts) and Red and Green (in Christmas quilts.) I see quilts using these two combinations all the time where I feel the quilt isn't successful because the values of the two colors side by side make the shape read as one thing instead of two separate, discrete things.

The eye notices CONTRAST first. It is hard wired to do this because it helps us see things in front of us. It helps us distinguish one thing from another. It grabs our attention. There are several kinds of contrast, and value is one of them. But it's the biggie.

So remember:

VALUE supersedes COLOR.

Now I am off to sew my blocks together.