Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Colourwork Conundrum

This is nearly a "what I'm working on" post.
It's still just a fermenting idea.

I picked up a few sweet little colourwork hanks from Fleece Artist in April, and so I'm dreaming about a cropped, colourwork yoke sweater.

One neat trick you can do to test out the suitability of colours is to photograph them together, and strip the colour from it by switching it to black and white.

Brooklyn Tweed has a great, in-depth post about how this process works. Basically, if you want distinct colourwork, you want yarn colours that, when switched to black and white, have distinct tones. They should stand out from each other. You can see how the wine coloured yarn is quite different from the gold and cream, but the gold and cream aren't suuuuper different from each other.

So, I'm wondering: should I move ahead with these three colours?

2 comments:

Shanna said...

I see three distinct tones in your black/white image - the cream and the gold don't look that close to me at all. I see a distinct light, medium, and dark, so I think these are okay.

To be honest, though, I think the whole "black/white image" trick is not a very helpful trick - if you like the colors together, then they go together. I go completely with my gut when I do colorwork, and it has never failed me yet. I did a Color Craving shawl by Stephen West in three shades that were all tonally the same (so they were all dark in my black/white image test) and the colors still stand out and individuate because they are so different in hue that they are still distinct. So I guess my problem with the black/white image test is that it only gives you information on tone, and hue and intensity are also just as important when deciding if your colorwork is going to work.

Kate (Hunter) Prater said...

It depends on whether your design wants a light/med/dark or a different saturation. I think the colors are lovely, and if you're concerned that the gold won't be distinct enough against the whit, make the red your MC with the red and white, and play with reversing MC and CC to have 4 color combos.