Hi there, It's Karen Brown of Just Get It Done Quilts.
Since I started this channel, the video I've wanted to do most is 'How to choose colours for your quilt'
Well today's the day. So stick with me and I'll show you how to do it.
So I started making this video on how to choose colours for your quilt...
and then realize I couldn't really do that unlessI talked about colour harmony...
and then I realized I couldn't really talk about colour harmony unless I talked about colour
so this is actually number one of a three-part series
This is about colour
What exactly is colour?
So our world is filled with electromagnetic radiation
And on one end we have gamma rays and x-rays
And on the high end we have microwaves and radio waves
And in between these two
we have the visible spectrum
Humans can see these colours because at the back of our eye
we have cone cells, three different types
one for blue, one for red, one for green
and these three colours make up the primary colours
and through their combination you can make all the colors of the rainbow
You're probably saying, "Karen, that's not what we learned in kindergarten.
"The primary colours are blue, red and yellow."
Well this is where colour begins to get confusing.
These primary colours are called 'additive' primaries because
when you add all the colours together you get white
When I was growing up the only time you ever heard of this system was
when you were talking about TV sets
but nowadays with computer screens, smartphones, iPads, digital publishing and Photoshop everyone uses it.
It is referred to as RGB
Primary 'subtractive' colours take advantage of the light that's reflected off objects
So with these glass bottles, white light shines on it
and the green and red light is absorbed.
And what remains is what we see reflected,
and we see this as blue.
We most commonly see it in the printing industry
And we probably all have a printer that has these cartridges
We refer to this systemas CMYK
But long before modern science, people studied colour
When Sir Isaac Newton put his mind to the task
the colour wheel with the red, yellow, blue primary colours was the result
and then others got into the game, colouring his black and white drawing
and even though it has been proved to be incorrect
it's still in common usage today
mainly because it's a really neat system
So the three primaries are red, yellow, blue
and they combine together to make orange, purple and green
And then you combine the primary colours with the secondary colours
to make the tertiary colours which have these very scientific names
red-violet, blue-violet, blue-green,
yellow-green, orange-yellow and red- orange
Together they all make 'the colour wheel'
What Newton also said was that
every warm colour had an opposite cold colour
Like I said, it's a really neat and tidy system.
Now you're probably saying,
"Okay, that's all fine and dandy, Karen, but where do all these colours come from?"
So all those colours which are a combination of primary secondary and
tertiary colors are called hues.
I've just chosen a random eight here for an example.
So if we take those hues and we add WHITE we get TINTS
If we add BLACK to those same hues we get SHADES
and if we add GREY which is a combination of black and white to the same hues
we get TONES
And this is where those flat color wheels
or maybe you see one like this
have a hard time explaining the whole story
because colour is not flat
Colour has three dimensions and is shaped more like a cone
The HUES of the colour wheel are around the top edge
The TINTS sit on the top surface and fade to WHITE in the middle.
The SHADES are on the outside bottom cone and fade to BLACK at the bottom
And throughout the inside are all the variety of TONES that fade to GREY on the middle axis
So just to illustrate this we're gonna start with a hue that I'm gonna call AQUA
If we sliced into that color cone, this is what it would look like approximately .
It would have the hue in the top-left corner along the edge
Then you would have the TINTS getting progressively WHITER along the top to the centre
You would have the shades along the outside edge going to black at the bottom point
And all those tones in the middle
until they fade to grey
It's the same with every hue
Let me show you another slice,
this time with a hue that I'm going to call CORAL.
So as a quilter, you need to know three things about colour.
One, you need to know about hue.
So hues we've seen before
They're just the colours on the colour wheel.
It's the primary colours and their combinations.
White and black and all the greys in between are not considered colours
because they have no hue
Two, you need to know about saturation.
So a pure hue is called 'Fully Saturated'
As we add white and grey our hue loses more and more of its colour
untill it's finally 'Desaturated'
But as quilters we don't often get our colour as a solid piece
It's usually in a pattern with some other colors and a neutral mixed in
Here is a palette of oranges all from one colour line
The palette has a nice bright orange colour with a shade of the same hue.
a yellow, and then a background of white.
So the orange in each one of these fabrics is quite saturated
but it's the presence of white and how much white that desaturates it.
So I like to go through my fabrics and organize them from the most saturated to the least saturated.
And three, you need to know about value.
We use a greyscale to describe value. Black being the lowest value and white being the highest.
So the lowest value black is at the bottom of the cone
And as you go up the cone of colour you get higher and higher values.
This is a good exercise to practice value.
Go to the paint store and get the set of chips that are all from the same hue.
These chips are all from the 500 series.
And then just practice organizing them where you think the common values are.
Continue sorting them until you feel that you've got all your values on the same level
And then take out your camera and take a black-and-white photo.
How did you do?
There is one final complications with value.
Not all hues have the same value.
Yellow has a much higher value than blue.
So when you're mixing yellow fabrics with blue fabrics,
your yellow fabrics will be inherently higher in value than your blues
With hue, saturation and value, we can describe almost any colour
If we wanted to describe the colour in the white circle
we could call it a desaturated aqua with a low value
So I'll talk more about saturation and value in my next video on colour harmony
I'm gonna leave it here today.
So thank you for joining me.
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