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A COLOURFUL LIFE
Choosing Colours |
| Colour is very emotive, and many colours traditionally have associations like blue = calm, red = hot, but it is a fact that different colours appeal to different people for a variety of reasons. As quilters we will often fall in love with a particular quilt, on-line or at a show, purely because of the colours in contains. If we analyse our respective fabric stashes (go on, I'm sure you've got one!) we will probably find it leans towards a particular colour. In my case it is turquoise, jade and other blue-greens - I do have other colours (lots) but my blue-green boxes are by far the biggest. Turquoise has always appealed to my heart, but wouldn't life be boring if I only ever used that. It's by combining it with other colours that things become interesting. |
Blue-green & hot colours
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Blue-green & purples |
Turquoise & Lime |
Jade & Magenta |
It is the combining of colours that often stumps quilters when they embark on a new project, hopefully here I might give you an idea of where to look for some inspiration. What it all boils down to is: if you like it - it's right - go with your heart - there are no bad colour combinations. The first thing I would recommend is that you start a Pinterest board for your own colour inspirations. CLICK HERE to set up a Pinterest Account if you don't already have one, it's free to join and is a fantastic visual resource. WARNING: Pinterest is a complete time-suck, be prepared to to be drawn into a magic world of ideas and images and lose a few hours at a time!
Once you start looking you will find interesting combinations everywhere - not just on quilts, but in interiors, in nature, in art, in fashion... There is also no reason why you can't upload your own photos onto your Pinterest board - if you see an likely combination when you are out and about, snap it on your phone. HH and I have a board called A COLOURFUL LIFE - have a look at what we've found, pin anything you like from there onto your own COLOUR board!
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There has been a great deal written about colour theory which I will not go into here (there are some good books available if you are that interested) but I will just mention the colour wheel in case you have not come across it before.
The premise is that all colours are made up of three basic, or primary, colours: Red, Blue and Yellow. These three are pure colours and cannot be made by mixing any other colours. However all other colours (or hues) are made by mixing these three together in different proportions.
I have given you a link here to the BBC Bitesize Revision sheet for colour which may seem like a strange thing to do, but it gives you an excellent precis, with examples, of complementary and analogous (harmonious) colour schemes as well as what happens when you add black or white to various hues.
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Pure, clean colours, like the ones at the top of this photo, are often used in Modern Quilting. The fabrics in the lower half of the picture show what happens when you add grey to clean colours (tones) - we still have a rainbow, however it is much more subtle and muted.
When you come to choose your colours you will need to take into account not just hues, but shades, tones and tints - how dark or light a colour is.
I have been asked why you don't see pink in a true rainbow. Well, pink isn't a hue in it's own right, it doesn't appear in the rainbow since it is actually just a tint of red (ie red + white) |
Below I have shown a couple of different ways I use to expand my colour combinations (steering myself away from turquoise!) and also given a brief guide to choosing fabrics for 3-D illusion blocks which are a particular favourite of mine.
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Pulling Colours from Fabrics |
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Here I have used a colourful piece of fabric to pull my colour inspiration from. The fabric companies spend a deal of money getting their fabric colours perfect so they are often a great place to start looking. I spent an amount of time picking fabrics that matched the printed colours exactly and, bearing in mind how busy the patterned fabric is, I chose plain or tone-on-tone fabrics with relatively small prints. To add interest to whatever quilt I make, I have pulled out dark, medium and light shades of the colours. The other thing to bear in mind is colour proportion. In the first picture the gold/yellow fabric is far too dominant and over-powers all the others. By moving it down the pile so only a small area is visible it is much less visually intrusive. As in the original fabric, I would only use very small areas of the gold/yellow in my finished project.
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Pulling Colours from Photographs |
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These are a couple of photos I took myself while hand-feeding some particularly tame peacocks on Brownsea Island some years ago. I have always loved peacock plumage and was facinated to be able to get close up.
Romantically peacocks are depicted with hints of purple or orange in their plumage, but when you really analyse the pictures you will see it is just subtle tints of blues shading to green. By putting the black & white print with the strong clean colours it gives additional depth and interest.
That said - there are no rules and if you wanted to add purple, orange or any other colour you like, go for it! |
Pulling Colours from Objects |
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Back to my good old blue-green! I have a passion for bone china mugs and how could I resist this one? The combination of the bue-green with greys, white and a chartreuse green verging on mustard makes for a sophisticated modern mix.
Have a look around you - in your everyday life you will find you are surrounded by interesting colour combinations.
When you are choosing colours, try to lay them out on a neutral background - grey or black are usually a good place to start. You will see on all these photos that I use a piece of grey fabric as my background rather than a green cutting mat which would be visually intrusive and will make assessing colours, and their relationship to each other, a challenge.
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Choosing Colours for 3-D Projects |
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3-D Illusions are very much my thing and there is no denying that you need to choose sets of fabric carefully with dark, medium and light values to make illusion pieces work. I always use small print tone-on-tone fabrics or plains for this sort of project. Personally I would avoid fabrics with an obviously directional print since not being able to line things up annoys me - you may not mind that so much. Definitely avoid fabrics with large or multi coloured prints - you will not be able to cut pieces of consistent colour from them, save these for other project, or they make great multi coloured binding.
Left and below are examples of a design called CUBITZ. Patterns for this and my other 3-D illusions projects can be found on my website: www.littlepatchpockets.co.uk
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Cubitz made in various three-tone colour sets |
Cubtitz made in more unusual three-colour sets - note the red/green/yellow set, even through these are three different colours, because of their values relative to eachother the illusion still works
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The easiest way to get dark, medium and light values is to start with a colour then choose a tint of that colour (with added white) and a shade of the colour (with added black).
Another way is to start with one colour, then choose the colours either side of it on the colour wheel (six-part or twelve-part wheel depending on how subtle you want your final images) this varies the hue rather than the tone of the your colour. (see below)
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Obvious contrast: Blue-Green-Yellow
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More subtle contrast: Teal-Green-Lime |
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Teaching yourself how to assess colour values is a most useful tool. You can accelerate your learning by using a useful gadget on your phone or pc photo-editing software: convert to black & white. If you want to check your choices, take a photo and view it in your black & white setting and the colour values will immediately become apparent. You can see a distinct difference in the colours in the photo below, but when reduced to black & white (left) the top three look very similar.
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