Quilt Color Techniques: Luminosity

Creating your next quilt with luminosity in mind can give it a wonderful, wonderful, dramatic glow. The word luminosity comes from the word luminate, which means to glow. There are lots of ways to achieve a glowing essence off of the surface of your quilt, but usually it's done with color. Here in this piece, which is a hand painted batik, I used bright colors, light colors, small places for those bright and light colors, such as the yellow and the white, and I surrounded them with darker, duller colors. It's those darker, duller colors that are larger that allow those small, bright light areas to glow.

I'm gonna show you a few other quilts that are using other color techniques to help them glow. In this piece, this is a great table runner made by one of my students, and it has lighter colors in the center of each of the blocks, with darker colors moving away from that center. And it's those dark colors that allow the center to glow. Also, it didn't hurt that she used a great metallic thread, and a wonderful meandering leaf to put twinkles all across the surface of the quilt. This next piece uses a really light area behind the tree that is surrounded by a darker area and then a really dark area.

And again, it's those dark areas that allow the light areas to glow. The fact that the tree is made from a sheer fabric, and a see-through, makes it look as though the light is emanating through it at sunset or at sunrise. It's a really nice way to include luminosity in a work. This piece really relies on the contrast of very light with very dark to create luminosity. The flowers here that are white with little bits of gray, are just glowing on the surface of the black.

I've added some really sparkly beads in the centers to help with that glow. Batik fabrics tend to have a luminescent quality of their own because they have light and dark areas, and the dark areas are usually muddier, and that muddiness adds a glowing effect to the lighter areas. Here in this landscape, where we see the yellow, which is a warm color, and warm colors naturally glow more so than cool colors, the yellow is glowing in this darker, duller sky. The fact that there's a dark border around there really helps the sky areas to glow too, so that it looks like the sun's peaking through after a storm. In this last piece, the whole piece seems to be illuminated, which is nice since it's supposed to look a stained glass window.

The way I accomplished that was by using bright, pure hues, mostly the yellow is doing a lot of the glowing work, but also the blue-green. The fact that the black that is in this area is so dull, and that some of the other colors are dull, really allows the light, bright, pure colors to really glow a lot. Using luminosity will make your quilt so much more dramatic, much more interesting, and keep you wanting to look at them longer. So try using some of these techniques in your next quilt.