Color Wheel

I'm running behind, having enjoyed a several day vacation and a marbling workshop last week, so I may be a bit sketchier on some of these assignments than I would like to be. This is a photo of my stash, but it's very specific stash: single colored fabrics, either from the fat quarter piles in Joannes or from the very nice Kona fabric quarters at Bay Quilts. The thing is, I have gone through their fabric quarters, all sorted by color, multiple times, actively looking for colors that I don't normally use or perhaps don't imagine that I like all that much. And I know that I have a lot more colors, especially in the blues range, because I love blues. But I had snagged a bunch of plain colors for a Maria Shell workshop last January and I know they are lurking with a half finished project related to that class.....just not sure where. Looking at the colors I have and the color wheel, I can see that I have almost no blue-green and blue-violet, even though those are colors that I enjoy. I also don't see much red-orange and little red-violet or yellow-orange.  I have been stocking up and grays and browns, but don't see a lot of pale tints.

Since I am prone to craft shopping and have bought enough fabric, beads and floss to give them all their own separate bins, I'm going to wait on adding new colors until I find the missing ones and take photos of each color range.

Orange through brown. I rarely think of brown in terms of being a "dark orange", but it is.

Grays through black. Need more grays .

Greens with analogous pals:

Blues. There's no way I don't have a lot more of these somewhere, blue is my "go to" color.

Reds, pinks, oranges, red-violet. In the abstract, not my favorite colors. So I have been consciously buying some.

There is a small, sick part of me that wants to display all my bead colors, but it would take forever to assemble and display them. If I had a giant warehouse for craft supplies, I might create whole areas based on color, ignoring the materials used. The aqua area would have aqua fabric, beads, yarn, floss, paints, whatever. I kind of doubt it would make me any more productive, but it would be fun.

On the colors I have used in my projects, I have tended towards blues, greens, purples or yellows, oranges, browns. I recently did an embroidery/mixed media piece on coarse brown fabric that I happened to have around and wanted to use. It was a mistake.....all of the technical decisions seem to be right, but I still don't like the piece because I just don't care for that brown, which predominates because it was chosen as the background. On the other hand, back in high school I did a fat, thick card-weaving wall hanging. The colors I used where light blue, dark blue, purple and sea green. I no longer have the piece but those colors are embedded in my brain because I loved using them together so much.

As I've gotten older I've become more attracted to green/yellow/brown/gray earth tones. Things that make me think of mossy trees. On the other hand, I've never been a big fan of pastels, especially those that look like "baby blanket" colors, unless they are on an actual blanket wrapped around an actual baby.

Also, since working more with paints and papers, I've become addicted to shiny and metallic versions of all colors. They will cause me to walk back and forth in front of a creation, watching how the direction of light changes an impression of the color. Without the right light, a lot of my pieces look dark and murky because the shine has to be engaged.

When it comes to floss I have as close to a full range of colors as possible because some years ago I decided to buy every single color of DMC floss during periodic floss sales. So I have the great colors, the icky colors, the darkest and palest shades, hot pink and dove gray. Just waiting for them to issue some new colors....

Later I hope to use water colors and make some paint shading samples. But not now, need to move on to other things.

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NOTE: This study is from an online design class I am taking with Lyric Kinard called The Artist's Toolbox, part 1. Information on the next offering of this class can be found here: https://app.ruzuku.com/courses/34574/about.