Using a Color Wheel to Choose Quilt Colors

Not too long ago, in a magazine article, I was asked along with a bunch of other quilters what our favorite tool was for quilting. And I said a color wheel, and the person doing the interview looked at me like I was crazy. Well, it's true, it is my favorite tool. I value it probably as much as I value the sewing machine. I'm a colorist, first and foremost. That's what I do. I study color, I teach color, I work with color, I use color, I harness the energy of color. That's what I do. Color is amazing. The more we know about it, the more we realize we don't know anything about it. None of us are going to become color masters because it would take lifetimes to understand color fully. And one of the joys about creating with color is just that, the unknowing. But the more we know, the more successes we will have and the less often we'll end up with a product that we kind of go, "Ah, not what I expected." So I try to know as much about color and the interaction of colors, how those colors come together, as I possibly can so that I can have predictably good outcomes. The color wheel is simply a tool that helps to describe a theory of how colors work with each other. Now, a theory simply means something that is based on good information that we think is true but we understand has variables. It's a theory. The color wheel can be purchased using two different color theories. One is the painter's primary and the other is the printer's primary. This is a painter's primary color wheel and it's the one that I've always used because the inks that we use in printing our fabrics are most often based on the painter's primary. The painter's primary is the one that we were taught in kindergarten. The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. So here with this color wheel, we know it's a painter's primary because the red and the yellow and the blue make a triangle. And we look at the back here and we see that when we point the center triangle at the red, the other two points point to the yellow and the blue. That tells us it's a painter's primary of red, yellow, and blue basis. The color wheel actually tells us almost all the information we need to begin a course of study on color. We can use everything that's here to understand the basics of color. When we look at the color wheel from the front, and this is the front of this particular color wheel, we see along the edge, the pure hue of the 12 colors of the color wheel. And if we start at yellow, we have yellow, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, red, red-violet, violet, blue-violet, blue, blue-green, green, and yellow-green. And every color wheel will have those colors on it. We also have on this one a color mixing guide that shows what happens when we add the primaries of blue, yellow, or red to any of the colors, and what happens when we add white and turn the color into a tint or add black and turn the color into a shade. This is a wonderful color wheel because it also gives us a grayscale. Starting here, moving all the way across, going from black to white. This helps us see the color with gray next to it and gives us an idea of whether or not we'd like to use white when mixing the color or black when mixing the color in fabric form. It also tells us about the colors. It explains the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue, and the secondary colors, and those are the colors made from mixing the primaries. The tertiary colors, which are the colors that happen when you mix a pure hue with a secondary, I mean a primary color with a secondary color. It talks about warm colors, those which come forward or advance, cool colors, those which recede. And then it describes some of the personality of color. It talks about hue, which is the fancy word we use for color, value, how much lightness or darkness it has, intensity, how much purity it has. And then it explains the color scale. And for some reason, this seems to be one of the hardest things for people to get. The color scale is simply what happens to take those 12 colors on the color wheel and turn them into somewhere between two and 10 million colors. Scientists are still arguing about that. We change those colors by changing the color scale. Pure hue is the color unadulterated. Tint is the color with white added. We add a little bit of white, it's a slight tint. We had tons of white, it's a tinted white. So we have all this variety that happens amongst the color scale. When we turn the wheel over, we get more information both visually and in the written word. We get to see the pure hue, tint, tone, and shade of each color. The outer wheel is the pure hue. The next wheel in is the tint, that is with white added. The tints are always lighter than the pure hues. The next is the tone and it's dirty. It's less intense than the pure hue. And then the inside is the shade. Now, this gives us one little, small portion of the variety. When we look at this section of green, we have just a million possibilities that are between the greens that we see. A little more gray, a little less gray, white with black instead of median gray. All these options, all these possibilities. In the center of the color wheel, we have a tool that really helps us understand common color combinations. These are color combinations that we know work. They have their own natural built-in dynamism because the colors, they interact with each other beautifully. And here we've got a long triangle, an equilateral triangle, a rectangle, and a square. And each of those represents something different. Now, here's where we get into trouble sometimes. Just because something's printed on the color wheel doesn't necessarily mean it's true. Sometimes other people think differently. Depends on who you learned color from and how you experience color. The elongated triangle is a split complement. The equilateral triangle is a triad. The square is a tetrad. These harmonies or color schemes are explained here on the color wheel so you can understand what it is I'm saying. I dare you to go figure out what a tetrad is. However, there can be some misinformation. Here we have a very long rectangle, and they say it's a tetrad here. And there are some of us as colorists who believe that for something to be a tetrad, the colors have to be equilateral from each other, meaning they have the same distance. So for us, this big, long rectangle is not a tetrad. It's a double-split complement. So things can be a little bit misleading at times, just like with visual temperature. Some colors, some of us believe are neutral in temperature and others don't. Even with this dichotomy, if you will, of belief system about certain colors, a color wheel can help you understand how colors interact with each other. It can help you determine what variety of a color you're gonna put in negative space or positive space to achieve depth or contrast or whatever it is you're searching out. I highly recommend that you purchase a good color wheel, and then you read all the information on the color wheel and you try to understand what it is they're telling you. And then the next time you go shopping for fabric or the next time you go to your stash to pick fabrics for a quilt, use one of the color harmonies on your color wheel and see how it works and see what kind of information it brings to your new piece. I think you'll be surprised at how much easier it is to choose fabrics and work with fabrics that go together well when you use a color wheel.