Master-inspired palette

The artist-inspired pallette I used a couple posts ago resulted in this double weave and sprang piece. The painting from which I took the colors is "The Pink Cloud" by the neo-impressionist Henri-Edmond Cross.

The scale is really too large for my taste.  The fabric is about a yard high and even bigger in the width.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it.

...but whatever I decide, I do have a series of coordinating scarves to go with it.

Color Challenged

A project for my color study group, where we each picked an artist "Master" to study.  I chose the impressionist painter Henri-Edmond Cross.  His work certainly has me putting together combinations of colors I would not have thought to try before!

My Blues Palette

After all those dyeing sessions, it's time to weave!  Here are the colors I am now working with.  From top to bottom, Tints, tones, direct modulation, and two levels of tints of the direct modulation series.

Notice in the grayscale version that the tints are reducing the saturation by lightening the value of the blue, while the tones are reducing it while leaving the value constant.  The direct modulation is almost constant value as well.  (Is it my imagination, or does it seem to be slightly darker in the middle of that series?)

One thing I did not include was a gradation of the blue to black by adding increasing amounts of  black (or rather a very dark gray, since I was dyeing white yarn).  So the darkest value is also the value of my most saturated blue.

Saturation studies continued - direct modulation

A third (and to me the most interesting) way to make a color less intense (less saturated) is by direct modulation.  Direct modulation is adding amounts of the direct complement of the original hue.  The direct complement is the hue directly opposite on the color wheel.  In this case my original hue is blue, and its direct complement is an orange.  In a gradation from 100% blue, through 50/50, to 100% orange at the other end of a series, the colors will be less saturated toward the middle of the series, and if they are true complements there should be a point at which there are "equal" amounts of red, yellow and blue, forming gray - a completely neutral, unsaturated color.

For my first direct modulation dye session, I guess I was thinking of orange as the color of an orange, that is, of the skin of an orange.  Well, it turns out that is more of a golden color.  So when I mixed this color with my blue, there was no point at which I got anywhere near a gray.  Instead I got a nice selection of greens.  There was never enough red in my orange to neutralize the blue and yellow.

For this particular blue, I needed a redder orange, more like a tangerine.  My second trial was more successful.  See the grayish hues in the middle of the series?

I think these more muted colors are so interesting that I did a couple more series using less dye, to get tints of the direct-modulated series.

More saturation - tones

Another way to desaturate a color is by making tones of the color.  Toning a hue down is adding a gray that is the same tonal value (lightness or darkness) of the original hue.






 
To do this with dyes on white yarn, I had to first find a gray that was the same relative value as my saturated color. So I dyed some grays using varying amounts of black dye on the same white yarn.  The grayscale version of the photo show that the blue is lighter than any of my trial grays.

So I tried again.This time I think the next lighter gray (labeled F) fits the best.

Then I used mixtures of this gray and my original blue to create the tones of blue.

Studying Saturation - tints

In our study subgroup of my guild, "Centered on Color & Fiber", this year we are focusing on two qualities of color, saturation and value.  For my exercise in saturation (aka intensity of a color), I have been playing with different ways to desaturate a color, or give it less intensity, when dyeing yarn.

One way is by adding white to the color, or in the case of dyeing, using less dye on white yarn.  Adding white to a color doesn't change its hue, it just makes its value lighter; these lighter colors are called tints of a color.

As I'd remembered from previous dyeing sessions, when you reduce the amount of dye in a linear manner, the darker more saturated colors in a series like this look closer in tonal value to each other than the lighter more pastel tints.

Here's a grayscale version of the same photo; some of the darker colors are hard to tell apart.

The darkest ball of yarn is dyed at a depth of shade (DOS) of 1.0.  This means that for every gram of fiber (yarn), I used 1 ml of a 1% dye solution.  You can use more dye and get even more saturated color, I guess until all the places on the fiber that can accept the dye are taken.  I didn't push that limit.  I'm just defining the DOS 1.0 color as my most saturated blue for this project.