Lesson 10 - Colour

Some of you have had fun with drawing over the snowflake but for others it has been a nightmare. That's OK. It's just one tool to give you a starting point. Different designers approach designs in different ways. A lot of that has to do with what you are designing. If you like making earrings you can often create and try out several new variations in one evening because earrings aren't very big. For quicker projects, trial and error is often the best choice because you can tat it and see the results immediately. So maybe you are the kind of person that can only design with the shuttle in your hand.
Both ways of designing are good and both can give wonderful results. If you design with shuttle in hand you just need to choose a starting point and go. You can begin with a 4 ring motif, a rose, or some other small motif or even a single ring. Just changing the number of picots on the starting ring changes the options you have and the direction in which your design will go.

So lets go on to another feature of design, colour. Colour can do amazing things for a design. A plain boring ring and chain design can be jazzed up with a rainbow of colours. Colour can make or break a design, but if a design looks good in basic white or ecru, colour can only improve it. However bad colour mixes can totally ruin a good design.

Rather than assume that everyone knows the basics of colour I'm going to cover them here. There is a lot of information on colour that can be seen on the internet, but the information can be a little confusing. That's because pigment colour like the colour that is used in an artist's palette is based on the primary colours of Red, Yellow and Blue; but a lot of the internet information refers to website colours seen on a computer screen and they're based on light waves. That colour palette is based on Red, Green, Blue. What we're interested in is pigment colour like the kind that's used to created thread dyes.
There are a couple of good websites with a lot of colour information and you might want to check out these:
http://plaza.ufl.edu/mmcadams/colorpages/index.htm
http://www.designbiz.com/net4/CompanyColor.asp?CompanyID=82357

The primary colours of Red, Yellow and Blue, don't look very good when they are together. So how do you get green thread from just 3 colours? by mixing them of course. Red and Yellow together give you Orange. Add more yellow and get a lighter orange, add more red and get a darker orange.
Mix Yellow with Blue and get Green. More Yellow gives a lighter green, more Blue give a darker green. Take Red and mix it with Blue to get Purple. Add more red or more blue to get everything from violet to burgundy.Have you ever noticed how many English words there are to describe purple?

The in between colours Orange, Green and Purple are known as secondary colours. When you mix the secondary colours with more of one of the primary colours in it, you get Tertiary colours like Orange/Red or Yellow/Orange. OK so we know how to get some other colours, but how do we use them? For that we need to go to what is called a colour wheel like this one. Here the colours are arranged in a circle or wheel that makes it easier to pick out shades of colour that will look good together. A thread in a primary or secondary colour from one side of the wheel will look good combined with tertiary colours on the opposite side of the wheel as accents. Tertiary colours because they contain a little of this and a little of that will happily play together with other colours while the primary colours are a little bit stuck up and will only play with one or two special friends.


So how does knowing this help us with designing? It helps us to choose colours that work well together rather than choosing colours that we may like, but they don't look good in the finished lace.

We have to remember though, that when we create a design for others to tat, they will choose to use the colours they like. I like blues and reds so they are the colours I work with most often, but I know other people like green, yellow and orange. If I do a design in blue it probably won't appeal to someone who likes fall colours, yet if I do the design in white they will see it's possibilities in orange and someone else will see how lovely it would look in purple. So unless the design just does not work - like the ring and chain doily done in rainbow colours- unless you use specific colours, it doesn't really matter what colour you use for your design. As long as the colours you use are appealing together. Even if it uses colours that other people don't care for, they should be able to imagine it in colours they do like.

Which brings me to one of my pet peeves which is the overuse of variegated threads. If you have created an intricate design, please, please, don't make the mistake of tatting it in variegated thread. The design will get lost in multicoloured thread and the design won't do the thread justice. A simple design like the plain ring and chain will absolutely come to life done in a variegated thread. You have all seen the butterfly I use as my logo. Here it is on the left in a solid colour. and you can see that it has a nice butterfly shape, but other than that it's a pretty boring butterfly design.

Here it is again on the right done with a solid thread on one shuttle and a variegated thread on the other, which makes a huge difference to the overall appearance of the design. Using all variegated thread would not have had the same effect at all. There is one other difference in that the design on the right has one more ring on each wing. The positioning of the dark section of the variegated thread makes all the difference in the world.

It isn't so much what colour you use for a design as to where you use it. Colour is so much a matter of preference, that I almost want to say that it really doesn't matter to a design, but of course you know that isn't true. It isn't so much the colours themselves as it is the colour intensity that you have to be concerned with. A vivid colour will draw the eye, so you must be careful to use vivid colours where you want the eye to go. If you want to highlight a design element, that's where the brightest colours should be. The rest of the design should use more muted tones so that the colours aren't fighting with one another for attention. On the other hand you don't want to use colours so pale and washed out that it make the whole piece of lace seem drab.

Colour is your friend. It can only make your lace look lovelier, just as long as it isn't overdone.