Color Choices

Most of the time, I choose colors intuitively. Sometimes they are driven by the theme of the piece, sometimes by my current favorites. Rarely do I choose based on their relationships on the color wheel. That has started to change a little since I read Colorworks by Deb Menz. The book has examples of color schemes based on various color wheel relationships, triad, tetrad, analagous, etc. The photos show numerous color combinations, many of which I would not have thought would look good together. Yet they are stunning!

In the dye class I facilitated last week, I asked participants to limit their colors during the week, so I decided to do the same for all my class demos. I used a rectangular tetrad combination of blue-green, blue-violet, yellow-orange and red-orange. I was surprised and pleased with the results. Even in cases where the colors mixed and mingled, the resulting blends were appealing.

Here are a few of the samples I created during class....