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Tuesday 23 May 2017

The Quilter's Color Club part 2

I have the book by colour expert Christine Barnes, called the Quilter's Color Club. It's an American publication and it's really annoying that Australia and England spell colour in a different way. I suppose it's not a big deal really.



I had some time to do a few more exercises in the book. You can see my first post about it here.

Once again I used the King's Crown block as recommended by Christine and I am only using a glue stick to make the blocks so it doesn't take very long.

We started off doing a neutral block, I really love using blacks and greys these days, the value and pattern really stands out and you are not influenced by colour. The dark triangles come forward and the lighter colours recede.

Neutral


Next was a monochromatic block in Blue-violet. Monochromatic uses different values of the one colour and if it isn't working it usually means that you do not have enough value contrast.

Monochromatic


Analogous blocks use colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel and I chose yellow-green, green, blue green and blue. Although all the books say that analogous colour schemes are usually 3 colours, Christine suggests that you may use four and a touch of a 5th colour can make it livelier.

Analogous

Christine admits that she made up the next combination herself, it's called every-other colour analogous. I chose red-orange, yellow-orange and yellow-green. I'm not sure if I like this one very much.

Every-other Analogous

Everyone knows the direct complementary colours, they are opposite each other on the colour wheel and so they really vibrate together, think of the red and green of Christmas.
Christine suggests that the hyphenated colours are more appealing and easier to work with because they contain 2 primary colours in unequal proportions.

I tried red-violet and yellow-green.

Direct complementary 

Split complementary colour schemes are usually everyone's favourite but I have often had an issue with them when I've tried to use them.  They have a good balance of light-dark and warm-cool. I chose yellow-orange, yellow-green and violet.

Split complementary

The next combinations are not as well known. Double split complements uses two colours plus their opposite colours on the colour wheel. I used red-orange, yellow-green, blue green and red-violet. It was hard to use so many colours in such a simple block.

Double split complement


Tetrad uses four colours equidistant on the colour wheel, this can be a very vibrant combination and I could have diminished the tension by using lighter values of the colours. This time I used red, yellow-green, green and blue-violet.

Tetrad

The last one I did was the Triad colour scheme which is as the name suggests three colours equidistant on the colour wheel. It is usually best to make one colour more dominant and let the other colours play a lesser role. Once again it's hard when you only have one block to work with. I chose blue-green, red-violet and yellow-orange.

Triad

This has been a fun exercise to do and I would like to finish the book especially as the next exercises demonstrate luminosity, transparency, stripes and texture. My problem is that I must stop experimenting for a while and finish some quilts that have deadlines looming.

The book will be waiting for me when I get these quilts finished I suppose.

I highly recommend the book for some colour fun.

Bye for now,
Linda

2 comments:

jude's page said...

Looks like an interesting project to do.

Linda Steele said...

Yes it was Jude, but the last part of the book looks more interesting. Hopefully I'l finish my quilts before the deadlines and I can get back to it.