Letters From Gene
A Study of Color and Design by Gene Wright
Originally published in Needle
Pointers, Volume XII, Number 4, Fall 1984
Part 5 of 5
Dear Nellie,
I was so pleased to receive your series of notes, Nellie, and I am always perfectly delighted to answer your questions anytime that you have time. If I don't know the answers, I'll look them up or contact someone who does know "so keep the cards and letters coming." You should make a practice of asking questions. There is only one "silly" question - and that's the one you don't ask. If there is anything that I can help you understand better, don't hesitate.
Your questions run a pretty broad spectrum, so lets start at the top and work our way through.
"What happens to a color of yarn when it is stitched?"
Normally, Nellie, it deepens - gets just a little darker than it appears to the eye in strand. This is because of light refraction. Light refraction is different from light reflection. Reflection is when the light rays are "reflected' -- bounced back to your eve from the surface of a color. Refraction is when the light rays are fragmented, shattered, on the surface of a color. Stitching causes texture. Texture causes light refraction. The more texture involved, the more light is refracted and the deeper the color will appear. There are two types of texture. That "felt" with the hand (tactile texture) and that "felt" with the eye (visual texture). It is fascinating that the tent stitch, which is a very smooth stitch tactually, will cause more light to refract than many other, more tactile, stitches. This is because the area that is covered by one stitch is so small and every time the yarn makes a pass through the canvas it causes the light rays to fragment. To test this out, cover about two square inches with the tent stitch and another two square inches in the same color using, say, a giant Scotch stitch. Then observe the effects of light refraction on the color for yourself.
"What about outlining -- when should I outline, and how much black should I use in outlining a piece?"
Outlining can be an effective design device if you use it correctly. It can be very dramatic when used to delineate flat color shapes, but you can make mistakes if you try to combine area outlining and shading in the same piece. This is not to say that there never will be a design that can effectively combine both - but they are normally used for different purposes and should usually be used separately - that is, either outline the areas of the piece or shade them, but as a general rule, don't do both in the same piece.
Outlining can be used in designs which are composed of flat color shapes or flat patterns, and is a device that is used to separate these areas from each other. But why limit yourself to black? Although black can be used in many instances, it is often more interesting to use a deeper shade than the area color, or a lighter tint. The only caution that I would offer along these lines is that if you outline part of a design, plan on outlining it all over. Outlining encloses a shape, and if just a few shapes are enclosed in the design, those areas will leap out and hit the viewers eye. It is usually more pleasing to uniformly outline all areas in the design, than to outline some and not others (again, there may be exceptions to this as there are to almost everything else in design and color).
If you use black be careful of the fiber that you choose. Paternayan black will produce a deeper black than, say, Medici (which will be softer -- Medici colors are uniformly softer than Paternayan's and remind me of the more subtle colors that are produced with natural dyes, although I'm certain they aren't). And if pearl cotton is chosen, the effect will be startling because not only will there be the very strong contrast of the black to the color, but also because the light reflective qualities of the shiny thread will have an effect. It will boil down, in the final analysis, to what effect you want to achieve. If you want a more subtle effect, the Medici would be your choice. If you want a dramatic effect - choose the pearl cotton. There's no substitute for testing the various fibers yourself.
"I have heard the term "light wheel" - what is it?"
This is a rather technical question, but O.K. The light wheel charts the effects of light mixtures just as the pigment wheel charts the effects of pigment mixing. It uses three different primaries: red, green and blue-purple. These are the same primaries that the television repair man used to adjust when he charged you that exorbitant fee to make the flesh tones something other than violet. This wheel helps lighting technicians in theaters answer the question of what colors of lights to mix to produce a particular visual effect in a scene. It is also used by interior decorators when considering lighting effects on the colors in a room.
Light has a very definite effect on pigment. In white light, we "read" red as red because of light vibrations reflected back to our eye. Each pigment has its own set of light vibrations. White light is attuned to these hue vibrations as we know them, and white light hitting a red object will screen out everything but the red hue vibrations and thus allow us to "see" red. But, if we were to put that same red object on a stage and bathe it in green filtered light, it wouldn't appear to be red anymore - it would look kind of a grayed, indistinct color. The light vibrations would no longer be attuned to the red because those allowing us to see it would have been screened out with the green filter. Conversely, if a red filtered light and a green filtered light were both trained on the same spot on a white wall, the spot would be yellow. Why the different effects? If you mix colored light, you are adding one light to another and the sum total will be white light. If you mix colored light and pigment you are subtracting the one from the other. Pigment mixing is always a visually subtractive process, because you need light to see pigment. And if you add all pigments together the result will be black pigment (or something very close to black).
As a general rule, we should take care to choose our colors in as close to the same light environment as we will be using them in order to insure that they appear as we wish them to appear in our work.
"I have also heard it said that pigment mixing doesn't really apply to needlework - that if you mix blue yarn and yellow yarn - you don't get green yarn. What about this?"
I suppose it boils down to what is meant by the terms "blue," "yellow," and "green." I ran a little test on my husband when I read this question. Now, my husband (bless him) knows enough about needlework to avoid sitting on a needle, and his knowledge of color theory is just about as great. I randomly chose a blue (it happened to be a rather bright blue of about medium intensity) and a yellow (a higher intensity more-or-less "true" yellow) from my basket of scraps. With one ply of each in the needle and on a scrap of congress cloth, I worked up an area using the tent stitch of about a half inch square. I held it about 6 feet from his nose and asked him what color he saw. His answer was "green".
No, I didn't get green "yarn" - I got green color and although I am certain that his answer may have been different if I had pulled out a dark, navy blue and a light, pale yellow - I wouldn't get green by mixing paint or dye that way either. And while the area produced was not a solid Christmas green - the visual effects of mixing blue and yellow yarn did produce "a" green color the same way that the Pointillists produced green by inter-mixing spots of blue and yellow paint, and for the same reason - the eye blends the small spots of color. Try needleblending your colors - you might be pleasantly surprised at the visual effects you get.
"Is there any difference between needlepoint color classes, such as those given at seminars, and "art school" color classes?"
The biggest difference would be the time spent in learning. In a university art school situation, the courses usually run for at least one full semester (often two) and meet somewhere between two and four times a week for between two and four hours each session - an average of about a hundred hours in class per semester. In addition to these class meetings, there is the time spent on the homework assigned, which is usually at least as much time as is spent in class.
In a good private class (if you are lucky enough to find one in color fundamentals) the course usually runs 10-12 weeks with an average of one session per week for about four hours each session - an average of about 40 to 48 hours total instruction time. There may be homework in this situation, also. Of course, shorter courses may be found.
In a seminar situation you spend 6 hours a day for two or four days working with the instructor - a total of between 12 and 24 hours of instruction time. Usually there isn't much homework that can be done in a seminar situation.
There are also correspondence courses in color and/or design offered by several of the needlework organizations. These may vary in the number of lessons, the amount of information covered in each lesson, the type of problems assigned, the amount of homework, and the time allowed for completion of the lesson by the individual teacher. Since a correspondence course in color and design is individual to the teacher, it is impossible to speculate on the number of hours necessary to complete it, but it's a safe bet that more hours of time will be necessary for a correspondence course than a seminar course -but not as many as would be required for a university course. Self-motivation is necessary to successfully complete a good correspondence course because the major difference between a correspondence course and a classroom course is the dialog (the personal interaction that occurs between yourself and the other students, or yourself and the teacher) that is possible in the classroom situation is not possible in the correspondence course.
As with any type of instruction, it is smart to check on the credentials of the teacher before you sign up for the class. It takes a different type of knowledge, training and experience to successfully teach color than it does to successfully teach needle work. But as a general "rule of thumb" a teacher who is (1) a working artist in the fiber arts or (2) has knowledge and/or experience in the Fine Arts would probably be worth your time and trouble. Color theory is color theory, and design principles apply to all of the visual arts, only the medium is different.
"Will it do me any good, as far as learning color is concerned, to experiment at home? And if I do, what materials should I use?"
You had several questions along this line, so I'll try to answer them all at once so they'll make sense.
The answer to the first question is most definitely YES! The main advantage to having a teacher is to have someone to think up problems for you to do and to critique and evaluate them after you do them, to point out what you did that was right and what you did that was wrong and what to do about correcting it the next time. It saves time to have someone there to answer questions. However, I firmly believe that anything that can be learned from a teacher can be discovered on your own if you spend some time experimenting. It will take longer and you may need a good book or two, but if there are no teachers available, go for it. You certainly won't do yourself any harm and anything that you discover will be exciting to you.
As for what materials you can use - how about crayons or colored pencils, for a start - or water color paints (if you use these, the opaque water colors are better learning aids than the transparents), or just plain old poster paints, though I personally don't like the way these mix as they have a tendency to "muddy up." I do like the acrylic paints. They have all the advantages of the fast-dry of water colors, but they will also remain fairly clear if you want to re-paint over an area after it is dry. That is, they won't re-activate the color that is already in place, it will just cover the area. Check at your local university art supply store, or even the local hobby shop might have materials you can start with.
I like the colored papers, too. They come prepackaged or are available in single sheets. They are marketed under several brand names. Color-Aid and Chromarama both produce pre-packaged colored papers. Color-Aid's Students' pack contains 202 hues, tints, shades and neutrals and Chromarama's Rainbow Pack contains 220. Either would be good. The advantage to using colored papers is that:
- You have a reference that has been scientifically mixed as to what hues actually look like. If you have never really experimented with color before, you should have some sort of standard as to what the various color names mean. What is considered to be a "true" blue or red? Why is this particular yellow considered to be "cool?" With colored papers you can determine many of the answers to the various questions by beginning to train your own eye.
- And, it is easier and often saves time and money to determine a color scheme by using colored chips of paper, and then matching yarn to the chips as closely as possible until you have the confidence of an experienced eye.
An important thing to remember when using colored papers is to identify the hue, tint, shade or neutral value in pencil on the back of each sheet when you first open the box (i.e., R/O, R/O Tl, R/O T2, R/O T3, R/O T4, R/O Sl, R/O S2, R/O S3, WHITE, GRAY 1, GRAY 2, etc.). If you don't, you are liable to mix up the colors and never get them back in the right order.
I hope this helps clear up some of your questions, Nellie. Until next time
Fondly,
Gene