Fiber Fool

Three weeks ago we covered the last of the color descriptors. If you missed the two color descriptor installments or think you may need a refresher, please check them out before continuing. We all need to be on the same page on how to describe colors so we can better discuss color combinations. Today we’ll look at the different ways colors can contrast.

Contrast

Contrast is often defined as “the state of being strikingly different from something else.” Now, if I told you that the color palette you chose for your fair isle sweater was nice, but lacked contrast what would be your first instinct to fix it? Chances are you would choose a darker version of the darkest color or a lighter version of the lightest color or both. When people discuss contrast with no further qualifiers it is most often in reference to value. That is one of the strongest forms of contrast since that is the characteristic of a color that we can perceive from the greatest distance. However, that is only one of many ways colors can contrast with each other. A richer or more dynamic color palette can be created by incorporating other forms of contrast in a color scheme.

Contrast in Saturation and by Default Value

Thinking back to the previous installment, saturation is a measure of the pureness of a hue. When we tint or tone a color we are changing its saturation and value. So, a contrast in saturation is also a contrast in value. This is one of the easier contrasts for us to evaluate because our visual experience is dominated by value.

When we explore three colors that are identical in all areas except saturation we find an interesting shift takes place. If you take the middle saturation color and place it in the center of a light and dark saturation you see the middle one looks like two different colors. In the image at left we see the effect on a neutral gray, removing the complications of hue it is a look at just value contrast. The smaller middle square is the same in both larger squares, but the one in the darker large square appears lighter than the one in the lighter large square. On the bottom of the graphic, you can see the middle gray is indeed the same shade, no matter what your eyes and brain tell you.

In this image (right) you can see it also happens when hues are involved. If you vary the tonal family in the example you end up introducing other forms of contrast, hence this simplistic demonstration. You should experience a similar effect as you did with the gray boxes.

Contrast of Hue

The highest contrast of hues is formed by complimentary colors. If you recall, the complimentary colors are directly opposite on the color wheel. Some examples include blue and orange, green and red, violet and yellow etc. If you don’t have a color wheel handy an easy way to determine the complimentary color is to stare at the color for at least 20 seconds and then look at a white area. Because of the way the light interacts with the rods and cones in our eyes you see what is called an after effect on the white that happens to be the opposite color. Give it a try!

While complementary colors add a lot of energy to an object, when you place equal amounts of complimentary colors which are of the same saturation and tone etc. next to each other there can often be an unsettling feeling. This can often be used effectively in visual art to help convey the feeling of the piece, however in usable/wearable fiber arts I suspect that is not often a desired outcome. In the image below, look at the left side of the central boxes and notice how that line between the orange and blue kind of vibrates?

This effect can be reduced in a variety of ways. The easiest way to reduce the uneasiness is to use unequal proportions of the complementary colors. Contrasting the two colors in other areas as well by choosing different saturations for example can also be quite effective; think of the pink and green color combo that has been popular. If the complimentary colors are broken up with a neutral like black, brown, or white, the energy of the complementary colors combo remains, but is more pleasant to an observer. See how the vibration is greatly reduce when you look at the right side of the central boxes above?

The complementary colors can also serve to help your design pop. If you are working an intarsia design and the background color and the design color are not contrasting enough, you can make the intarsia stand out better by outlining that section with its complementary color.

Contrast in Chromaticity

Just as we saw with contrast in saturation, when surrounded by another chromaticity, the perceived color characteristics can be tilted towards the opposite of those in the surrounding color. For example, a bright vibrant color around a medium chromaticity color will make that medium color appear duller (left). The opposite is also true. If a dull, low chromaticity color surrounds a medium one, that medium one will appear more vibrant than when viewed alone (right). Again, if you need to, use a white sheet of paper to cover half of the graphic.

Contrast in Temperature

You may have at this point noticed a trend in the contrasts. The surrounding color enhances the opposite trait(s) of the color it surrounds. A darker color makes a lighter color appear even lighter than it does on it’s own. A duller color makes a brighter color appear even brighter. The same holds true with contrasts in color temperature or undertones. This is most notable when the middle color is one on the line between warm and cool colors.

In the graphics at right, notice how the red-violet appears cooler when surrounded by the warmer red and appears warmer when surrounded by the cooler blue. This form of contrast is also sometimes referred to as simultaneous contrast, depending upon your source for color theory information.

Conclusion

When working with yarn we don’t have the luxury of an unlimited color palette unless we are dyeing our own, so often we’re not going to be able to work with only one of these forms of color contrast. That is okay. It is just important to be aware of the different ways in which a color can contrast with those around it so you can better evaluate what you like or dislike about a given color combination. You can also use these perceptions to adjust how a color in your design is perceived.

Additional Posts in the Color Series

• Intro Stuff - Colors and Design
• Intro Stuff - My Color Meme Answers
• Part I: Hue and the Color Wheel
• Part II: Color Descriptors I
• Part III: Color Descriptors II

On Thursday we covered some of the properties of colors we need to have a grasp of so that we may discuss the various ways colors contrast. We covered tones, tints, tonal families, chromaticity, and saturation, with a quick review of hue at the top as well. If you have missed the previous posts in this series I suggest you scroll down to the end and start at the beginning.

Today, I’m going to finish up the color descriptors so that we may move on to looking at the ways in which color can contrast on Thursday. Keep reading for value, luminosity, color temperature, and undertones.

Value

Value is a property of color that more people are comfortable discussing so it is probably familiar territory to most. At the very least more familiar than chromaticity and possibly more familiar than saturation as well.

One of the easiest ways to describe value is to call it the perceived lightness or darkness of a color. In reality the hue does not impact the value. Value is measured by comparing a color to gray values. Each hue in the color wheel has a corresponding gray value. So, if you take a colorful photo and turn it into a grayscale image you are comparing the values of the object in that photo. Bright colors and warm colors can be hard to determine the value of, as the intensity of their color can make it hard to judge it appropriately.

There are a few ways to aid you in determining the value of a color. The easiest, but not always the most accurate, is to simply look at colors while squinting. By squinting you are restricting the part of your eye that perceives hue and are thus seeing in near grayscale like an old black and white television. You always have your eyes with you so you do not need to worry about loosing any special tools, which is the advantage to this method. However, once again the warm and/or bright colors can still get through the squint routine and cloud your judgement of value. This is less problematic when judging a monochromatic (using colors from the same tonal family) or analogous (neighboring colors on the color wheel) set of yarns or other types of fibers.

Another option to aid in evaluating value is a tool that is often found in quilt shops and sometimes referred to as a value finder. Most often these tools are a piece of red tinted translucent acrylic that you look through. They also have green versions. Sometimes the quilt shops give them away as key chains for special events. You can also find versions similar to shop safety glasses so you can have both hands free.

Luminosity

Luminance is also sometimes heard when speaking of color, but is much more scientific in its definition. It is a measure of the intensity of light per unit area. This topic is a bit beyond this tutorial, but I wanted you to be aware of what it is. It’s tied pretty directly to value as well as to the incident light.

Color Temperature

This descriptor should be pretty familiar to most. If you draw a line through the color wheel passing from between red-violet and red to between green and yellow-green, you have the cool colors of red-violet, violet, blue-violet, blue, blue-green, and green on one side of the line. On the other side of the line you have the warm colors or red, red-orange, orange, yellow-orange, yellow, and yellow-green.

When mixing warm and cool colors in a design, the warm colors tend to come forward and the cool colors tend to recede into the background. This is partly due to the fact that in general, the cool colors tend to be of a darker value than the warm colors. Also note that when making tones from the cool colors (see in circle of colors) that the change is more subtle and truer to the original hue when adding black to cool colors. The opposite is true in the warm colors, especially the lighter ones such as yellow and orange which rapidly approach warm neutral tones.

Undertones

So, what about all this talk of cool reds and warm reds? That temperature classification is describing the undertone of a color. An undertone slightly changes our perception of color, but not enough so to move the color to another tonal family.

Only pure light does not have an undertone. All colors on the color wheel can be described with a cool or warm undertone descriptor. An obvious way to observe undertones in our world is to look at a project that has used more than one dye lot. Often the variance in dye lots is due more to a slight difference in the “color” of the natural fiber being dyed. Today with such precise measurement techniques and computer controls the dye bath itself can be mixed very consistently, barring human error such as insufficient rinsing of the vat between batches.

Neutrals can also have undertones. If you can recall the first installment on the colorwheel and neutrals, the graphic (reposted here) shows how the neutrals can have undertones of the dominant color in the mix.

Much of today’s information should be a bit of review. So, the plan at the moment is to be back with another installment at the usual time on Thursday. We’ll be looking at how neighboring colors can influence our color perception and ways in which colors can contrast in addition to hue contrast.

Additional Posts in the Color Series

• Intro Stuff - Colors and Design
• Intro Stuff - My Color Meme Answers
• Part I: Hue and the Color Wheel
• Part II: Color Descriptors I
• Part IV: Contrasts and Perception

Last week we learned a bit about the color wheel, how neutral colors are made when working with paint, and defined hue. If you missed it, check out Hue and the Color Wheel.

When using multiple colors in knitting and other fiber arts it most often comes down to contrast and in what way you wish the yarns/fibers/fabrics to contrast. In order for us all to be on the same page when discussing color harmonies and how they contrast we need to have a good grasp of the various ways in which to describe color. So, in this installment I will be defining a few of the common color descriptors with a few more to follow early next week.

Hue

Hue was defined in the previous installment, but it is very important to understand it so as a refresher, hue describes a range of wavelengths being emitted or reflected by an object. It is what differentiates each of the colors on the color wheel. Hue is described by the color name, though it is most often described by a general color family. Colors we refer to as candy apple red, sky blue and sea green, for example are not hues. Remove the descriptors of candy apple, sky, and sea and you are left with their hues of red, blue, and green. Hues usually are described with no more detail than the tertiary colors and more often just the secondary colors.

Tones, Tints and Tonal Families

If you take a color and add white to it to lighten it you have a what is referred to as a tint (bottom of the graphic below). All those nice, light pastels everyone loves dressing babies in are tints. Pink, baby blue, pale yellow, peach, etc. are examples of tints.

If you take a color and add black or gray to it we often say we are “toning it down.” Colors that are darkened by the addition of black or gray are called tones (top of the graphic below). So, if you look at the forecasted fashion colors for this season you will see there are many tones in that palette, especially those for women.

If you were to take a slice out of the color wheel and look at the gradations from the darkest tone, through the pure hue to the lightest pastel version you have what is called a tonal family. When we discuss color harmonies in the coming weeks the entire tonal family can be chosen from and still fit within a specific color harmony. In fact, one of the best ways to mix red and green and not get that stereotypical “Christmas” feel is to use different tones and tints of the two colors, such as a very dark green and a medium or light pink. It is still a red-green color combo, but by mixing up the tones and tints used you end up with a very different feel.

Chromaticity

Chromaticity and saturation are ways in which we describe the pureness of a hue. Take a look at the tonal family. If you look at the color in the center of that graphic you see a red that is similar in qualities to those seen on the color wheels of the previous color post. It has no tint (whiteness) or tone (black/grayness). That color has a high chromaticity. The higher the chromaticity of a color, the closer it is to a pure hue.

Why are tints and tones lower in chromaticity? Because if a hue has no chroma (the Greek word for color) it is a truly neutral white, gray or black. The range from black to white with no hue is the black tonal family. The black tonal family has the lowest chromaticity possible – none. Add in just a tiny bit of yellow to make the white more ivory and warm up the black slightly and there is chromaticity. Not much, but some.

Saturation

Those who have worked with mixing paints or dyes knows that adding white or black to the paint (or lowering the concentration of dye) is not the only way to make a color appear slightly “muddied.” A more complex and visually interesting way to create a duller appearing color is to add some of the complementary color – just as we did to make the neutrals last week, only often you tip the scales further towards one color of the complementary color pairs.

Yes, I did just say that one could make a more complex and visually interesting dull color. It may not sound possible, but if you are a multi-crafter or have kids and you have paint around, take two tubes – one color from each side of the color wheel (red and green, or blue and orange, or violet and yellow) and start working a titch of one color into the other. Keep tipping the scales until you get to a nearly 50/50 mix. All throughout the mixing process, no matter the ration of one color to the other, the resulting color has a bevy of undertones to it, yes?

Technically speaking, saturation is the measure of how far a color is from gray. Sometimes this is referred to as intensity of a color. Colors mixed with their complementary colors move closer towards a neutral gray the closer to equal parts of each color and thus become lower saturation. Colors that are purer in hue are of higher saturation. Colors that are mixed with neighboring (analogous) colors are of higher saturation than those mixed with colors across the color wheel. The tones of a color are also lower in saturation.

So, in the paint experiment described above, you will be lowering the saturation of the paint color each time you add more of the complementary (see graphic at right). At least until you achieve the 50/50 ratio. If you keep adding the complementary color beyond that mark you are tilting the scale of the color towards the color you are adding and thus raising the saturation. Say we are working with red and green. You start with red and keep adding more green until you have a neutral color. During that stage you are decreasing the saturation. If you continue to add more green and turn the neutral towards the green side you are increasing the saturation each time you add more green to the mix.

Once again, the closer a color is to its pure hue, the higher the saturation of the color. If the color is nearer to the neutral that is made by mixing it with its complementary it is a low saturation color. Often such low saturation colors are described as muddy or dull.

Putting Chromaticity, Saturation and Tonal Families on a Color Wheel

Just as you can mix neighboring colors infinite times and have an infinite set of colors or hues, you can have an infinite set of colors in a tonal family. The color wheel to the left shows the tertiary color wheel from the previous post with a tonal family overlay. The tones are at the center of the wheel and the tints on the outside.

You may notice a black circle cutting through the middle of the colorwheel. That is a line of constant chromaticity and saturation, marking the areas of purest hue. If you gave that circle a larger diameter is would still be a line of constant chromaticity and saturation (as long as it is centered on the wheel), they would just have different measures if the diameter of that circle were changed.

There is another line on that color wheel. One that moves straight out from the center of the color wheel through the center of the green section. This is a line marking a constant tonal family. In this case, it marks the green tonal family. Any color sampled along that line would be a part of the same tonal family.

Conclusion

So, those who read Margene’s post yesterday may have noted that she prefers purer colors. Another way to put that is to say she prefers high chromaticity and high saturation colors. If we look again at the forecasted colors for this coming season, the women’s colors especially fall into the category of low saturation and low chromaticity.

This has gotten a bit long. Color is easier learned about in small chunks and thought about and applied for a bit before moving on. So I’ll stop here for today and have the rest of the color descriptors early next week for you. While you await the remaining color descriptors, I suggestion observing the colors you come across in your day and analyzing them for saturation and chromaticity as well as identifying what tonal family they would be a part of. If they have lower chromaticity, are they tones or tints? Or, are they dulled by the addition of their complementary color?

Once again, if you have questions, please do not be shy, leave a comment!

Additional Posts in the Color Series

• Intro Stuff - Colors and Design
• Intro Stuff - My Color Meme Answers
• Part I: Hue and the Color Wheel
• Part II: Color Descriptors II
• Part IV: Contrasts and Perception

Color, in the scientific sense is a property of an object to reflect light at certain wavelengths. However, color plays such a large roll in our daily perceptions that the word has come to have many other meanings outside of just describing the appearance of something. Case in point? It is not unusual to talk about the “color of music” of speak of a “colorful character” (and not just in reference to how that person dresses).

Color is a *very* large part of our daily lives, even if you do not go around taking notes of striking color combinations you see on a billboard sign or in a garden in your neighborhood. It means color is also a very personal thing. While we may go through phases in our color tastes (often impacted at least in part by current fashion and decor trends), in general those who know us can often peg our tastes quite accurately. Color in our knitting (and other crafting as well) can be a great way for us to express ourselves, but choosing colors from a nearly unlimited palette, a less than ideal palette, or changing the color scheme of a published design can be intimidating. On the opposite side, just because we are comfortable with a certain color combination doesn’t mean it is the best choice for every type of project.

Because this is primarily a knitting/spinning blog I’m going to address some issues of color over the next few weeks or so from the point of view of knitting. To do so it is important that we are all on the same page when describing color. So, first up is a brief intro to the vocabulary of color, starting with hue.

Hue

Hue describes the characteristic of a color or the wavelength that is being emitted. It is what differentiates red from violet and so on. It is described by the color name. Fancy names such as olive or cranberry are not hues, however. They are descriptors for more complex colors that are not just a pure hue. If you added the color family name onto those colors you would then be identifying the hue. For example, take olive green – it is a form of a green hue. The same goes for cranberry red – it is a form of a red hue. Hues usually are described with no more detail than the tertiary colors (defined below) and more often the secondary colors (also defined below).

Primary Colors

As the name implies, the color wheel is a continuous wheel of color. It starts out with the three primary colors. Primary colors are colors that cannot be made by mixing other colors together, but instead can be mixed in varying proportions to create any of the other non-primary colors. The three primary colors are red, yellow and blue.

Secondary Colors

The secondary colors are those made by mixing neighboring primary colors in equal amounts. These will fill out the color wheel to match what we as kids considered the “rainbow colors.” The three secondary colors are orange, green, and violet.

Tertiary Colors

There are six tertiary colors made by mixing the neighboring primary colors in unequal amounts. This means each of the three secondary colors can lean more in either direction. The names are described with the dominant primary color listed before the secondary color it resembles. The six tertiary colors are red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet (sometimes called purple), and red-violet.

The Neutrals

You will notice that these rudimentary color wheels have no neutrals in them. There is no black, white, gray, tan, or brown. Well, those are more complex colors. When you are talking about a white object, it means it is reflecting all light. A black object is the opposite – it absorbs all light and reflects none. It gets even more complex when you look at it in terms of mixing paint. Obviously you can’t mix white from other colors and often when you try to mix black you end up with some form of brown.

Browns and grays are tricky as well. Brown is usually made by mixing equal parts of the three primary colors or alternately by mixing a primary with it’s complementary secondary color (the colors directly opposite on the color wheel), this leads to a wide range of browns that can be either cool or warm in their appearance. Each of the circles in the graphic above had a 5 px average color sample taken and was placed into the grid of the graphic below. Notice how the “browns” on the left are warm and move towards cooler “browns” on the right.

Grays are usually just a toned version of black. If black is made by mixing it can be warm or cool depending on the ratios of all the colors being mixed. It is often harder to judge that in black, but once you tone the black down into a gray it is easily seen to be a warm or a cool gray just as we saw with the “browns” above.

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If some of the descriptions in this first post were intimidating, don’t worry I’ll be covering them in the next installment. Don’t be shy about asking questions. I’ll e-mail you back or answer your questions in the follow-up posts. If this post was all familiar to you keep checking back as it will taking a more knitting-centric view as we progress.

Studying color on the computer is not ideal as everyone’s monitor will display colors differently. This is also what makes it so hard to choose yarn on-line for a project. Access to a functioning color wheel will come in handy as the series progresses. Many color wheels are set up to help you mix color, but if you can locate one that does not focus on that you may find it a bit easier to use for knit design. My favorite color wheel is by EK Success, which comes in a size small enough to keep in your knitting bag and contains some helpful hints in identifying some of the classic color harmonies. There is also a good color wheel and template overlays available as part of Color Works by Deb Menz if you can locate a copy.

Coming up next? Tonal families, chromaticity, color temperature, value, saturation and more!

Additional Posts in the Series

• Intro Stuff - Colors and Design
• Intro Stuff - My Color Meme Answers
• Part II: Color Descriptors I
• Part III: Color Descriptors II
• Part IV: Contrasts and Perceptions

Like others I did some “training” for Tour de Fleece. Despite sore feet, last Friday I finished my first bobbin of singles for my Solar Dyed Spun Stitches Shawl (no, still no shawl pattern chosen). Yesterday I was antsy. I’m having issues beside my feet and am rather miserable at the moment so I finally decided I was going to spin anyway - bruised feet and cracked fingertip be damned!

To get the second bobbin of singles going I needed to prep another one of the batts that I had made. I recalled getting asked about my technique of preparing the batts so I took photos as I did it last night. I hope you find it useful.

Batts are rectangular pieces of drum carded fiber. They are the width of the carder and the length of the circumference of the drum. There are many different ways to spin from the batts, including rolling it into a tight cylinder and spinning from the end of that. In this case I wanted to turn my batt into something resembling roving. We’ll call the finished product “roving.”

The first step is to orient the batt in the portrait form, that is with the longest side vertical and the shorter side horizontal. Starting in the upper right corner begin to tear a strip of the batt away from the main piece. Be sure to choose a width that is measurably thicker than what you’ll need in your drafting zone to achieve the weight yarn you need. Here it was 2-3 fingers wide and I’m spinning lace weight singles. Continue to the tear until you are near the bottom edge of the batt. Stop when you are roughly the same distance from the bottom of the batt as your strip is thick.

Move over the same thickness as the first strip and start a new tear in the batt, moving upwards and once again stopping before the end of the batt. Continue making these zig-zag rips in the batt until you have formed on long strip of fiber.

From the tearing the strip of fiber will be a bit rough around the edges. There will also be those obvious turns in the strip of fiber as well. If you made your strips sufficiently thick you can now pre-draft the strip of fiber to clean it up and make it more resemble roving. In the photo on the right I made two passes of predrafting. Look how much longer, and nicer looking it is!

The pile of pre-drafted roving is much more than I can get through in one spinning session so I roll it up into a nice ball of roving. I introduce a bit of twist as I form the ball to help hold the fiber together and give it a bit more stability. Below you can see the fiber in its three states - the original batt, the spun singles and a ball of “roving.”

The photos with step-by-step notes can also be seen in my Flickr Set.