Showing posts with label color. Show all posts

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Paper Dyeing - an Explosion of Color

I'm in another one of those stages right now where I can't yet share any of current bead work, so I thought I'd share a little side project - dyeing paper.

Why dye paper? Well, originally I used it in my design work. Now, I mostly use it to wrap my Etsy packages. But more than that, I dye paper because I love the chance to play with color in such a direct fashion. Using the resulting papers for wrapping is a lovely way to use the papers so that I can dye more down the road without burrying my studio in the stuff. :)

So, here we go:

I fold a dozen or so papers a day until my tray is full

My dye workspace mid process - even the cleanup paper towels end up pretty

an old cafeteria tray filled with a dozen or so folded and dyed papers

I dye the folded papers one at a time and place them on my cafeteria tray

placing folded, dyed papers on plastic throughout my studio to dry

Then move them to plastic and open them up a little to dry - my studio is awash in plastic!

a leak in my glove dyes my thumb a deep purply blue

turns out there was a leak in one of my gloves.

After scrubbing. The dye really shows up the damage from my beading needle

bundles of folded, dryed paper remind me of streamers of color

Time to unfold the dried papers - I gather them in bundles first like streamers of color

the fluffy stack of unfolded, dyed papers

I stack the unfolded papers to await ironing

Then it's time to iron each sheet of paper - one by one

the ironing makes the designs more visible

Stacking the dyed papers on my main work table

side view of paper roll shows of the colors

I had to roll one of the stacks because I love this cross section shot

some of the papers fanned out on my work table. I dyed 102 sheet in total

My first Etsy package wrapped using my newly dyed papers -with one of my little cards

So there it is! Several days and weeks worth of intermittent work in a series of fifteen photos.

Right now I wrap all of the items from each Etsy purchase up together as they fit better that way in the packing envelope. But going into the holiday season, I will offer to wrap them individually, and include blank versions of my little gift cards (right now the cards are little thank you notes from me).

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Complimentary Colors and Opposites Attract

Can't believe it's been a week since my last blog post! It's been rolling deadlines for the past month and looks likely to continue through Bead Fest at the end of this month. But I did get the class proposals in last week, and just submitted my book project for review - should hear back on that by tomorrrow, keeping my fingers crossed. In the meantime, I've promised to write a post on complimentary colors.

Fall is my favorite season. I love this time of year, as Summer and Winter fight it out for supremacy. The days are still sunny and warm here in Seattle, but the nights are cool and chill. We're still using our summer sheets, not quite ready for flannel yet, but I had to find an extra blanket for the bed. And I love the colors. One of the trees outside our house has turned a bright scarlet while the other is still mostly green - a perfect complimentary color combination.

Everywhere I look the trees are layered with red, orange and green leaves. And since we're at the end of the dry season, there's golden brown grasses and bright blue skies. It's funny that once the rain begins the grass will green back up and stay green through the winter, but our 'sunnier' days will tend to have bright white skies instead of blue. So I'm definitely enjoying the blue while we have it. To top it off, the sunrises lately have been magnificent; in shades of violet and purple and gold.


I seem to particularly like blue/orange color combos for earrings

Like Summer and Winter, complimentary color combos draw both warm and cool temperatures into play. You're pulling not only from opposite sides of the color wheel, but also from opposing color temperatures.

Take the Blue/Orange compliments: here you're combining orange, the hottest color on the color wheel, with blue the coolest. This makes for a particularly dynamic color scheme, but also poses its own sets of problems as the two vie for dominance.

reds and greens in my Autumn Rain freeform peyote bracelet

I created my Autumn Rain freeform peyote bracelet nearly five years ago now, attempting to capture the particular colors of the season.

It's funny in that I usually think of it as "red", but in truth, it has a strong green component. The green is simply more muted and darker, taking on the role of branches and shadows while the reds do their best to steal the show.

I also love how the transparency of the beads, glowing just the way that fall leaves do when the sun hits them just right. I've never been able to capture that as well in any other medium.

Looking at the combinations on a standard color wheel, I noted the following, which I thought I'd share:

Orange and Blue: some value contrast, strong color temperature differences

Purple and Yellow/Gold: strong value contrast, some color temperature differences

Red and Green: smallest value contrast of the complimentary combos, some color temperature contrast, too.

burnt orange & phthalo blue acrylics color mixing study

And if you mix two compliments together, you end up with really interesting neutrals - sometimes greys, sometimes blacks, sometimes browns.

It's funny, but I really don't seem to use the purple/yellow colorway in my beading. Looking through my work, the closest I could find was a thread painting sample I made years ago. It's free motion embroidery, which I haven't touched in ages but is very nearly as slow as bead weaving.

Think I may have to look at a project in purple and gold. In November.

For now I'll just keep trucking away. And in the meantime, I'm slowly adding to my latest Pinterest Board on, you guessed it, Complimentary Colors.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Analogous Colors - Kissing Cousins or Noisy Neighbors?

For this seventh installment of my weekly design series, I'm continuing along with the color wheel, this time looking at Analogous Colors.

Analogous Colors are next door neighbors on the color wheel. They go together quite naturally due totheir close proximity. In fact, sometimes it can be hard to decide where one color leaves off and the next begins.

Take the paint color Cadmium Yellow Medium for example. Is it really, truly yellow, or is it orange? My eye tends to say it's the later, especially when compared to the bright, sunny shade of Lemon Yellow.

A quick peak at the two color charts to the right and you'll see what I mean. That's where the 12-step color wheel comes in handy. In my world, I label Cad Yellow Med yellow-orange and count it good.

But from paint mixing terms, you can see that it is a yellow, because when mixed with blues I get a series of green intermediaries, not browns or neutrals (this is something I'll revisit again next week when I talk about complimentary colors).

Cad Yellow Medium and Lemon Yellow are also great examples of warm and cool hues of the same color. I'll let you guess which is which.

Here are a couple of other Analogous Color Combos from my painted color studies.

Cadmium Yellow Med again, this time paired with Napthol Crimson, which is a fun red with a bit of blue undertones.

The vertical swatch of red in the top right hand color is an unmixed example of the crimson. Mix it with just the teensiest bit of cad yellow and you get the bold red of the horizontal stripe.

So warm and yummy! You could totally turn this into a fall color scheme.

The purples in this mix are quite warm, indicating that both the red and blue had distinct red undertones.

This color combo is very dramatic, and makes me think of Flamenco. Probably because the purply reds make me think of shadows in the ruffles and flounces of a flamenco dress.

Freeform peyote bracelet shading from yellow-orange to violet through the warm side of the color wheel

Here's my Spanish Dancer freeform peyote bracelet again. I debated adding it to this post, but I just couldn't write a post about analogous colors and not include it.

It's has an extended range, encompassing half the color wheel from yellow-orange all the way through to violet, but it's definitely an analogous color combo in the ways that the colors flow from one to the other.

hand-beaded fish in purples, blues and lavender

And here's one of my little Fancy Fish. I made this one for my husband, so I was going for more masculine colors, so I stuck with the blue/purple sides of the color wheel.

It's almost the same colors as a Japanese fighting fish (except its fins were a deep purple-black) I had in college and I figured, what could be more masculine than a fighting fish?

So now it's your turn? What are some of your favorite analogous color combinations? I'd love to see them.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Me, Myself and I - Monochromatic Color Combinations

Continuing in my design series, today I'm thinking about monochromatic color combinations. Designing around a single color. The single color works as a strong Unifying element, but since we're only using one color, Contrast has to come from somewhere else.

Ocean Currents, freeform peyote bracelet with color palette

Ocean Currents, freeform peyote bracelet - blue, blue and more blue

Truth is, I don't work with monochromatic designs every often. When I do, I tend to make liberal use of Value such as my in Ocean Currents series.

Here, I shade from bright white to deep blues.

I'm also using Undertones to provide additional contrast - with both warm and cool blues. But I've stuck with relatively pure, intense versions of each hue.

Leopard Jasper, freeform peyote choker with color palette

In my Leopard Jasper choker, I shade from a light cream, through dark chocolate, ending on the other end of the value scale at black.

Brown is more often considered a neutral, rather than a 'color' in and of its own right. That said, there's no reason why you can't use it as the focus of a monochromatic composition.

You just have to find interesting enough browns. I combined warm, rich browns with more neutral antique bronze beads (which worked well with the antique bronze button).

Lariat by Malin de Konig

Adding Neutrals for Contrast

Malin de Konig graciously allowed me to use the picture at left of her lariat.

In this clean, elegant design, Malin combines a single shade of red with a warm, rich neutral brown and antique brass. I love how it allows the red to sing and take center stage.

Check out Malin's blog post to see additional pictures.

Additional Resources

Looking for other samples of monochromatic compositions, I put together a Pinterest board, aptly named Monochromatic Jewelry Designs, using a number of the pieces from Sally Russick's One Crayon Color challenge from earlier this year.

Monday, September 3, 2012

The Color Wheel - One Big, Happy Family

Everyone's seen at least one Color Wheel in their time, likely you've seen a half dozen or so. Most have a lovely rainbow of colors like the one above. We have:

The primary colors: red, yellow, blue.
The secondary colors: orange, green and purple/violet.
Then there are the tertiary colors, sandwiched between the primaries and secondaries: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, red-violet.

You know the drill.

However, the Color Wheel itself isn't the purpose of the exercise. Rather, it's simply a tool to help us better understand the Relationships between the various colors on the wheel. Because all the colors on a particular wheel are defined by their relationships, you could say that they are one great big color family, bound by a number of familial traits.

A particular color wheel, familial traits, you ask? Yep!

The colors are linked by the traits we looked at in earlier posts - Undertones, Value, Intensity and Color Temperature.

This means that you can play with varying these traits uniformally around the color wheel to study and develop alternate Color Families. The key is to change them uniformly while obeying a few simple rules, so that the color relationships always remain the same.

For instance, yellow is always the lightest color and violet the darkest in terms of value on any given color wheel. So if you decide to create a color wheel of pastels, you'd need to keep this in mind. If violet somehow ended up lighter than the yellow, it simply wouldn't look right for that color wheel.

Three Rules (or Strong Suggestions) for Color Wheels:

1) Value: As noted above, purple is always darkest (has the lowest value), while yellow is always lightest. Also, the red and green should have approximately the same relative values.

2) Color Temperature: Orange is always the hottest color in any particular color wheel. Blue is always the coolest. Again, if you create a color wheel that breaks this rule, it simply won't look right.

3) Intensity: All of the colors in the wheel should have approximately the same relative intensity.

In the traditional color wheel pictured at the start of this post, all of the colors are fully intense versions of their base colors.

my stab at an Earthtoned Color Wheel

But you could easily create alternate color wheels. For instance:

If you wanted to make a color wheel of Earth Tones, you'd likely want to look at less intense, warmer versions of each of the colors. You might or might not mess with the values.

In the color wheel of pastels I mentioned earlier, you would lighten (raise) the value of each of color, while making sure the value relationships between the different colors remain constant. Because, of course, constancy is essential to any good relationship!

You could even make a color wheel of neon colors, were you so inclined. So long as you work within the basic relationship rules, you're good to go to build a spiffy new, custom-made color wheel.

And since I'd love to see more participation with this series, I'll issue a challenge. If you put together your own unique color wheel in any medium (beads, paint, paint chips, yarn, etc), name it, photograph it and either email it to me or post it on my Facebook page by September 11th (my anniversary) I'll enter you in a drawing to win the beaded bead pendant from my most recent Bead Soup. I'd love to hear from you!

Monday, August 27, 2012

Vocabulary Review - The Elements of Design so Far

Right now I'm running a series covering the elements of design, introducing a new element every Monday. Well, with the Bead Soup Reveal and Blog Hop this past weekend, I'm a little behind. I thought I'd do a vocab review this week, then start in again fresh next Monday. Figured it would work well for anyone just joining in to!

I also went hunting for additional links for each of the topics.

Value and Contrast

Value - the quality(ies) of lightness or darkness in a particular object or composition.

Contrast - how the different values in a composition work together.

Read the full post.

Additional Links:
Inside Out Style takes a fun look at value and contrast using the coloring of a number of actresses for comparison. The post also has a nice value scale photo in black & white and three colors.

The design notes for Jim Saw's Art 104: Design and Composition class at Palomar College. It's written as notes for a college class - heavy on information, but with fewer pictures. Great if you want to really drill into the subject. Also has a nice section on value and contrast as it relates to photography.

Hue and Intensity

Hue refers to the specific name of a particular shade of a color. For instance Peacock blue versus Sky Blue.

Intensity allows us to look at the relative clarity of a particular Hue in reference to its base primary color.

Read the full post.

Additional Links:
The Color Cube has an in-depth look at color. They use the terms "Chroma" and "Saturation" to look at what I term "Intensity".

Colors by Hue. Microsoft put this list together for web designers, but it's a great reference for anyone studying color.

Color Temperature and Undertones

Color Temperature - the inherent warmth or coolness of a particular color (especially in relation to its place on the color wheel).

Undertones - temperature variations within the same color family.

Read the full post.

Additional Links:
There are no pictures, but Kate Smith at Sensational Color provides a a great explanation of undertones.

Again no pictures, but Exterior House Paint Colors goes into great detail about the relative effects of undertones on your overall composition.

Maria Killam has written an entire series on undertones. Her focus is more interior design, but still useful. And it has pictures!

So, there's my vocabulary recap. Hope you have a chance to look at the original posts if you didn't catch them earlier.

And if you have links you think are particularly useful for any of these topics, please share - I'd love to put together a link library

And next Monday, we'll start looking at the color wheel.

Monday, August 20, 2012

Hot, Hot, Hot or Not, Not, Not

Welcome back to my ongoing series on the elements of design. Today, I'm continuing to look at color - focusing on Color Temperature and Undertones.

Color Temperatures working around the color wheel

Sunny yellows, red hot, cool blue - every color has an associated Color Temperature.

Working around the color wheel, those in the red to yellow range are warm. While the blues, greens and purples are generally regarded as cool colors. Seems simple enough, right?

Well, it gets a little more complicated than that, unfortunately.

The Color Temperatures on the Cusps Fluctuate.

That's right - red-violet and yellow-green are sometimes warm and sometimes cool. Because they're stuck halfway between the warm and cool colors, they don't really know which family they belong to and shift their apparent color temperature dramatically based upon who they're paired up with.

Just to be ornery, they'll tend to take the opposite Color Temperature from the majority. Kind of like reverse camouflage.

So, if they're paired with warm colors - lots of reds, oranges and yellows, they'll seem cool. Snuggled in with cool blues, greens and violets, they suddenly turn up warm.

Check out the lime green beads in my samples at right - they're the same in both photographs.

Then there are Undertones. Here's where we get into cool and warm hues of the same color family.

Looking at the swatches, which red would you describe as warm? cool?

Varying the undertones can create Temperature differences even within the same color family, such as the red sampler above. Brick Red is quite warm, with strong orange undertones, while Alizarin Crimson is a cool red with strong blue undertones.

This is one way to increase interest in monochromatic compositions. Undertones can also explain why different hues of the same color simply don't seem to go together.

This week, take a look at some of your bead stash and try to identify the undertones of the various hues - do they tend to be warm, cool or evenly mixed?

Monday, August 13, 2012

Today's Vocubulary Words: Hue and Intensity

At different points in my life, I managed some fluency in both Spanish and Russian as well as maintaining some reasonable command of my native English. Learning new languages always drives home two points for me:

1) Use it or loose it - if you stop practising a language, it becomes more and more difficult to use it with any fluency.

2) Our language frames and shapes our thoughts, and different languages make it easier to think about different things.

Which leads me to my theory - that if you have significant trouble working with color, it's likely because you've either never learned the particular vocabulary that would best allow you to analyze and interpret what you see, or that you simply haven't allowed yourself enough time to practice. And that's really what this whole series is about; developing a working vocabulary.

Nine and a half different reds (acrylic paints)

Our vocabulary words for last week were Value and Contrast. This week it's Hue and Intensity.

Hue refers to the specific name of a color. For instance, the color red comes in many different hues. A few common names include crimson, fire engine red, magenta, rose, brick red - I'm sure you can think of several more. Each differs slightly from the other in one or more ways.

Intensity allows us to look at the relative clarity of a particular Hue in reference to its base primary color. Primary colors are fully intense examples of their basic hues. So, primary red is fully intense.

In the print industry, Intensity is referred to as Saturation.

When we use adjectives such as bright, rich, dull or muted to describe a hue, what we are often trying to convey is its relative intensity (or lack thereoff).

You can Alter the Intensity of a Hue without changing its Value in one of two ways:
1) Add in just a smidge of its complimentary color. If you're working with red; add just a touch of green.

2) Mix in a neutral grey of the same relative value. Since the grey is the same value as your color, it will.

Working with paint (one of the easiest ways to play with color), I made some samples:

Playing with Intensity - Napthol Red & Cadmium Orange

Top row
* Left: painted a swatch of Napthol Crimson - relatively close to primary red.

* Middle: mixed my red with a drop of Sap Green, which is very close to the same value. This lowered the intensity slightly without changing the value much if at all.

* Right: mixed in a neutral grey (made from titanium white and ivory black). Interestingly, my camera darkened the value of the least intense hue so that it is quite noticeably darker here in the photograph.

Less intense hues often appear darker than more intense jues to the naked eye - apparently my camera had the same issue.

Along the bottom row, I started with Cadmium Orange Light, mixed in a little Ultramarine Blue and then mixed in a neutral grey.

To try and show the mixing in another way, take a look at this photocollage of my color mixing:

Top left: color photo of my mixing pallet - the camera did a better job of recording the values here.
Bottom left: the same photo converted to greyscale.
Top right: checking values through a green film (the green discards all red-based color information)
Bottom right: my Intensity worksheet converted to grey scale.

So, my samples didn't turn out quite as well as I'd hoped, but we got to look at another vocabulary term: Relative Value. Which means that the apparent value of a Hue can be affected by its intensity.

Red beads of varying intensities

Spanish dancer cuff: high intensity composition, detail Hunting Fae necklace: low intensity composition. Both pieces by Karen Williams

Examples of high and low intensity compositions

And last, but not least, two samples again using some of my art work. My cuff, Spanish Dancer, is bright and lively with a high intensity composition made almost entirely of pure, fully intense hues of each color. Meanwhile, my Hunting Fae necklace has a more autumnal look with its range of much lower intensity hues.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Brown - what a boring name for an interesting color

Last month I signed up for Sally Russick's One Crayon Color challenge and blog hop. But instead of choosing a color myself, I asked Sally to assign me a color. I'll admit to being a bit, uh, surprised when I was assigned 'Brown'. Hmmm.... somehow I tend to forget that it is indeed a color, in and of itself.

Truth is, I like browns, they're just not what I think of using this time of year. Unlike the fashion industry, I tend to work in the colors of the current season, and browns are definitely Fall/Winter colors in my palette. For inspiration, I went to - you guessed it, my crayon box. There I found browns with luscious names like chestnut, tumbleweed, mahogany and bittersweet, but oddly enough, no chocolate.

Then I came across an old UFO, a companion piece for my Leopard Jasper bracelet, and I knew I'd found my piece. So here it is, so newly finished it doesn't even have a name of its own yet, right now its simply the Leopard Jasper Choker. Descriptive, eh?

And the back shall be front

This is actually a picture of the back of the choker. The shank on the original button I'd selected when I began (and abandoned) this project two years ago had broken, so I went shopping for new buttons to fit the project and found this beauty. Now, my choker has two alternate fronts. And seems to have a decidely western feel I hadn't anticipated when worn back to front.

Here's the jasper focal:


Leopard Jasper choker, freeform peyote

I like the almost snakeskin quality to the coloration and bead work. I think that is also adding to my feeling that this comes from the dusty southwest of my childhood. Not the land of red rock, but of golden, drifting sand.

Truth is, I'm not entirely certain the choker is quite complete. I may decide to add more top work - layers of bridges atop what's already there. The bracelet definitely has more top work. I found that simply increasing the scale from bracelet to choker created enough complexity that I'm not sure it needs anything else. I think I'll live with a bit and see before I go too far and made it too 'busy'. What do you think?

And in the meantime, here are the other participants, nicely grouped by color families: