Project One - Colours - Feedback and Photos

Having completed my module on painting, I've talked about colour and colour science a great deal recently. When I was working for my painting, I wrote a very long essay on Chevreul, the French chemist who wrote a couple of books on 'colour contrasts', creating plenty of diagrams and comparisons as I went along. It was quite an interesting little project, but it did make me realise a few things. Some general, probably unscientific, and opinionated talk follows:
I've found in the past that the rules governing a colour wheel aren't applicable to every case. Personally, I prefer a more instinctive approach to colour, involving context, emotional response and connotation. The idea of the phrase, 'complimentary colours' is that these colours, being opposite to one another on the colour wheel, should work together particularly well. I've never really found that myself, and I'll show you why. Take red and green as examples. They occur together frequently in nature (red roses on green stems, Boston ivy in autumn, plenty of birds), and yet, if you put together similar shades, they look strangely gaudy. Yet put another colour closer on the wheel with one of them, and they look much less offensive. As a very, very simple demo, let me put this up with polka-dots. For reference, here's the colour wheel I sampled from.

The red? Well, that's frankly alarming. One of the phenomena that Chevreul observed in his work on complementaries was the effect of 'halos' around colours that, if paired correctly, would make some 'pop', like red on green here, and 'sink', like blue on green. Basically, if you pair a colour with it's complementary, it brings out both colours. Put red and green together, and the red is a brighter red, while the green is a brighter green. It's an interesting effect, and one which can be used to great effect when treated properly. Of course, what shade you choose is very important. Take this chart of red and green in varying shades, with the amount of saturation versus black at the top.

Now take a look at this sampler, showing the extent to which the colours enhance each other according to how much 'pure' colour is contained in each combination. The brighter, or purer, the colour, the more the smaller blocks 'pop' out from the background. The lighter combination is very thinly outlined in a darker shade of red or green - it's hard to make out - but the darkest combination is outlined in a very light green halo.

So, if colours are enhanced by juxtaposition with their complementaries, why not use these pairings more often? Well, at this point, I'll also explain a little about the connotations of complementaries. Putting red and green together makes for a strangely dated looking composition in interiors or a violent clash in abstract painting, but - combine it with white, and suddenly, it's a whole other cosy world: it's the three colours of Christmas.

 You'll note that here, I've toned down the brightness of the colours in accordance with my saturation chart, seen above. As I say, that's another factor to consider when picking a colour. If I made this sampler with crimson red and lime green, for me, it would tend to look cheap, especially if used in conjunction in large, uninterrupted blocks, such as part of an advert or display. That effect is furthered by using the complementary of a background colour as text. Red on green, or green on red, text is near unreadable because of the halos overlapping! So, taking an instinctive view on colour - and this is only my personal preference - I tend more towards the blue side of the spectrum, and like quite dark and watery colours best. Here is another sampler:

On the left, the primary colours. This triangle certainly stands out, and has a feel to it of three main tones - bright light in yellow, a mid-tone in red, and a shaded section in blue. The centre triangle is made up of the three main colours from the 'blue half' of the wheel - it feels very flat, without any real change in tone between green and purple. By adjusting the colours 'instinctively', I ended up with a paler triangle, seen on the left, in which all three colours have been brought closer together in tone. It certainly doesn't stand out as much as the first triangle, but it is 'easier on the eyes'. Of course, It's very different using blocks of colour in juxtaposition to using them in varying shades in a picture. As I've shown, putting red and green together in bright blocks doesn't necessarily improve them. These are only my primary thoughts on the subject, and as I had a good deal of fun with the rest of the section, I don't want to give the impression that I have in any way approached it with a closed mind.

The section of this project on understanding colour that I most enjoyed was, naturally, the embroidered demonstration of the colour principles. Here is a picture from the first exercise of three, aka 'stage 5'. Please excuse the unused part of the fabric at the top of the frame - a foot is attached there!

This project was a lot of fun, and all the more so for the way that using varied shades of my primary colours, blue and red, meant that they worked together to produce different effects close-up and far-out! I think that while the seed stitch was the most pleasing plain stitch, the way that the sampler seen at the very top left not only used up a load of my leftover threads, but created bands of blue, red, and purple was pretty special. It might look nice applied to some chiné silk patterns, as were popular in the 18th century on fabrics such as this one. Before I give my verdict on my work from this section, there are a couple more stitching exercises I'm dying to get going on, so I'll return in part two of this post.