Knitting on Impulse

Lost Lake

So I took the lake:

And pulled out the palette:

The skein isn't dry yet, but I'm really pleased with the result:

I think I shall knit this up along the lines of the purple scarf - but since the green patches are supposed to look like irregular shadows, I won't try too hard for the perfect sine wave.

I found a correlate in my gemstone collection, too (cloudy aquamarine and idocrase):

I know bright sunlight isn't the best for these kinds of photos, but we haven't had any for a few days, so I couldn't resist!  More yarn pics tomorrow when the silk is dry. 

Rose

It was a good weekend - several sorts of good, and though it makes me glance nervously over my shoulder to say it, I think I might even have my mojo back.  (I probably shouldn't have said that out loud, but why live in fear?  Creating is so much better than reacting.)

Here's what became of the "rose" silk:

The yellow did a passable imitation of a sine wave, meandering to and fro along the length.  I think this is the closest I've come yet to recreating a natural colourway (though the evergreen scarf was a close second) - funny that it's also one of the most - shall we say - "vibrant" colourways I have done.  The contrast is almost a little overwhelming - what do you think?

I was going to share another dinner and recipe, but I think the tomatoes might clash rather horribly with the scarf.  Tomorrow.  (Like a host of other not-yet-gotten-to stuff - putting the Rockin' Girl Blogger button up - thank-you Charity and TanteJ - also replying to about a million emails, and and and....)

Sun and Rain (continued)

One of the core principles in traditional Fair Isle is the practice of maintaining approximately constant levels of contrast throughout the pattern.  While value is not the only factor contributing to contrast, it is a very useful place to start. 

The greyscale function is a great way to analyze value, independent of the confounding variables of warmth and saturation :

The palettes rearranged in order of value:

Starting with the ribbing, I chose to anchor the bottom of the pattern with the darkest values, graduating upward to the lightest.  Here's where some eyeballing and judgement comes into play - I kept the sequence intact, but strategically repeated certain colours in order to control the level of contrast.

I tried a blues-on-copper pattern, again keeping the sequence but strategically playing with proportions to keep the contrasts similar throughout.  Occasionally, when the saturation of a particular colour made it too prominent regardless of proportions, I simply omitted it from that sequence.  Conversely, when there wasn't enough contrast, I skipped forward to a more intense hue, and continued the sequence from there.

I kept the motif very simple, in keeping with the original photo.  Copper-on-blue:

One possibility for putting it together:

This is perhaps the simplest of an infinite array of possibilities, and missing many of the design elements of traditional Fair Isle, but it does illustrate some useful concepts in juxtaposing colours for two-stranded knitting.

Sun and Rain

I thought it was high time to get back to playing with creating patterns from photos.  This week's subject is not technically a natural object, though it does represent nature at work.

It is the weathered edge of the Celestri sculpture which graces the courtyard of the Four Seasons hotel, across the road from our condo.

I used the mosaic function to tease out individual colours:

This is just begging for a Fair Isle treatment - the juxtaposition of desaturated cool hues with the hot peachy copper, and the sober shades of black anchoring the bottom.  The cracks in the metal clearly suggest the shaded two colour ribbing that would border the garment.

The first step is to sample each of the three main colour groupings (I generally start by pulling out as many different colour variants as I can find, without worrying about order or proportion.)

But since this is getting to be an awfully long and picture-heavy post, I shall carry on with the process of analyzing, ordering, and patterning tomorrow.

Playing With Colour IV: Optical Mixing

Optical mixing is the phenomenon whereby the eye "blends" colours placed side by side to perceive a third colour.  The smaller the dots of colour, the more complete the blending effect.  An excellent article on the difference between additive, subtractive, and optical colour mixing, and the use of optical mixing by pointillist painters, may be found here.

The phenomenon of optical mixing is particularly relevant to knitters, being responsible for the richly painted appearance of traditional FairIsle, as well as the often dramatic (and occasionally distressing) difference between a handpainted skein and its knitted object.  It is also the effect that may be deconstructed by pixellating a photograph into larger blocks of the component colours.

Optical mixing of complementary colours creates a desaturated third colour, particularly when mixed in approximately equal proportions:

Using a darker shade of orange shifts the balance a bit, however, being an intensely warm hue, the orange still dominates the mix:

Optical mixing of analagous colours creates the impression of a single colour somewhere in the middle of the hue range, but with subtle depth and shading:

Proportion and mixing become particularly critical when trying to recreate a particular effect.  Take the delicate hues of this mountain sunrise:

Isolating the individual colours

Yields the palette:

Wide stripes, such as one might find in Noro yarns, would give the closest approximation of the graduated bands of light in the photo:

Short colour repeats might yield something like this:

Tiny colourwork motifs could further blend the effect:

 

All three are perfectly attractive in their own right, but if you had your heart set on the first, you might be disappointed to get the second or third.

Practical points:

• A relatively small collection of coloured yarns can be strategically arranged to create the optical impression of a much larger palette. 
• When designing with hues that are far apart on the colour wheel, pay particular attention to proportion - length of the repeat in a variegated or handpainted yarn, size of the stripes or motifs in colourwork.  Remember that complementary colours tend to desaturate each other - those rich jewel tones may well coalesce into a lovely shimmering brown. 
• Varying the value, saturation, and relative amount of a single component hue can dramatically alter the perceived colour of the mix.
• Consider optically mixing analagous colours to add depth to a single hue. 
• Try swatching on screen or paper first, to narrow the choices. 

Playing With Colour III

Last week was pretty heavy on the theory, so I thought I'd stay with the ideas of saturation and value this week, and demonstrate some ways to play with them, using the crocus palette as a starting point. 

The first thing you could do with a Nature-derived palette is to work with it exactly as you find it.

This is the challenge I set myself for the Patterns in Nature series, mainly because I wanted to break out of my colour comfort zone and learn from what I found rather than judging it.  It is by no means the only option, and once you take the step of translating a pattern into yarn, you will be forced to make choices and compromises in any case.  It helps immensely to know which changes will be most likely to yield the outcome you have in mind.

Starting with the, ahem.... exuberant option:

ie.

Nudging the warmest and coolest hues into direct opposition on the colour wheel, choosing a dark, saturated version of purple and a light, saturated version of yellow-orange (in equal amounts, to boot) yields just about the maximal contrast you could ever hope to achieve.  Fabulous for a 7 year old's birthday cake, possibly less so for all but the most extroverted fashionistas.

What if you liked the cheerfulness of the contrast, but wanted to tone down the eyeball searing effect a wee bit?  One option would be to maintain the contrast in value (dark/light) but go for less saturated versions.  Changing the proportions would further civilize the combination.

You could reduce the difference in value but maintain the saturation:

Or some combination thereof - playing with value and saturation gives you loads of options for fine-tuning the dramatic effect of a palette.  Don't forget that the characteristics of the fibre itself will also affect the optical result - texture, fuzziness, and shine all create effects that alter the perceived properties of a colour. (More on that another day.)

At the opposite (but much more common) extreme: what if you are terribly conservative about the colours you wear, but fell in love with the royal velvet of that crocus?  You could fall back on the safe option of simply combining lighter and darker shades of purple, but the result (though attractive) lacks some of the depth and complexity that made the original so appealing.  You might like to benefit from the added spark of a complement, nevertheless, it will be a chilly day in Hades before you wear orange.

One solution is to tame the complementary colour until its origins are so subtle as to be barely recognizable.  There are a number of ways to achieve this, such as adding orange to the purple to progressively desaturate it to a nice unassuming brown, or vice versa.  (This is where an accurately printed colour chart comes in handy, but I will try for a reasonable approximation here.)

Another solution is to go back to the original three-way palette (top of this post), but keep the proportions severely in check.

A tweedy yarn with infintesimal flecks of the desired colours can be particularly helpful in this regard.  Placing the warm hues within areas of similar value will also help to keep the contrast in check.

The possibilities are infinite.  The general principle is that drama is heightened with increased saturation, wider contrast (light/dark, warm/cool) and large blocks of the contrasting colours. If you love a particular palette but are uncomfortable with the dramatic effect, try isolating the aspects that most appeal to you (eg. richly saturated dark purple) and tweak the remaining colours to fit your personal vision.

Fine tuning the contrast in this way comes in particularly handy when planning traditional Fair Isle - but that's a topic for another day.

Playing With Colour II: Balance

The one consistent feature of successful colour schemes is balance.  They may be high intensity, or soothingly quiet - but in their own way, for their own purposes, they are balanced.  I suspect it is this phenonemon that leads to the proliferation of dogmatic colour rules:  "It will Never Work Unless you include a bit of something complementary / light / dark / warm / saturated etc."  Within a particular personal colour esthetic, such a rule may give consistently satisfying results, but it can also be limiting.   Balance is as complex and subtle as the colours themselves, and I find it most useful to understand the underlying attributes of a colourway and play with the parameters until something clicks.  Equally enlightening is the practice of collecting and analyzing existing instances of pleasurable colour, especially from the natural world.  The whole process is about training the eye and the intuition to see deeply, and be open to new possibilities.

This will be a rather theory-heavy installment, but I felt it would be sensible to give a very basic introduction to some of the concepts that form a basis for experimentation and play.  This is by no means a comprehensive treatise on colour, and there are excellent books out there that expound on the subject in great detail, my favorite being Deb Menz's "Colorworks".

1) The Colour Wheel. It is well worth your while to procure a high quality printed version for reference, as it is an incredibly useful tool.    The wheel places colours in a natural progression, orienting the coolest directly opposite the warmest.  The cool shades fall above the horizontal line, the warm below it, and the primary colours (red, blue and yellow) form an equadistant triad.

Colourways tend to fall into two main categories: 

Analagous colours lie adjacent to one another on the wheel eg. blue-green, yellow-orange-red. There are rules and conventions about how much of the wheel should be used, but the main point is that the colours relate by being close, by flowing into one another, and therefore have low tension in their relationship. Analagous colourways are easy to succeed with, though their exclusive use can be boring. 

The second group of colourways relates through geometric symmetry at points around the circle, including arrangements such as complementary (directly opposite), split complementary (a triangle between a colour and the hues on either side of its direct complement), hexad (six evenly spaced colours) etc.  I think of these as high tension relationships, with the highest tension occuring between direct complements, particularly where the cool/warm disparity is greatest.  The tension creates energy and excitement, but also necessitates careful balance, which is where the colour wheel becomes a very useful problem solving tool.  Try plotting your colourways on the wheel and playing with the resulting geometric proportions.  Often (though by no means always), adding a colour that completes a symmetrically balanced shape (or subtracting one that is skewing it) is just the thing to pull a combination into harmony. 

Ideas:  If a direct complement is overwhelming, try turning the tension down a bit by using the hues on either side of it.  Spice up a bland analagous set by adding a wee dab of their direct complement.  Keep in mind that the quantities of each colour do not have to be equal (in fact, it's generally a bit jarring if they are), nor do the qualities (saturation, value).  As the number of widely spaced colours increases, so does the sense of busyness.

Having said all that, none of this is absolute.  Nature makes some perfectly lovely colourways that are not analagous, neither do they form a symmetrical triangle or polygon on the colour wheel.  I think of the wheel primarily as a tool for seeing, playing, and sometimes getting unstuck. 

2) Value refers to the lightness/darkness of the colour as it compares to the grey scale.  For example:

In PhotoFiltre, clicking the big colour block at the top of the vertical menu on the right will open a small window with detailed parameters of the chosen colour.  (Ignore the red/blue/green for now - see the disclaimer below.)  Playing with the "Lum" number will adjust the value.

3) Saturation refers to the relative brightness and purity of a colour.  Saturation is decreased by adding something:  white (which will also lighten the value), same-value grey (maintains the value), black (darkens the value), or another colour, often its complement, which dulls the colour but adds complexity.  Here's an example of decreasing saturation while maintaining the value:

In PhotoFiltre, playing with the "Sat" parameter will allow you to adjust the saturation while keeping other parameters constant.  (Since this offers only one of the myriad of desaturating possibilities it is somewhat limited, but it is quite interesting to plug in a given colour and see where it falls on the scale).

Overall, warm colours tend to dominate cool, lighter stand out against darker, high saturation dominates low.  Varying these parameters may create intriguingly subtle illusions and effects; for example, warm colours are perceived as being lighter than cool colours with equivalent saturation and value.  Balance and harmony depend on the complex interplay between all these factors (and more besides).

Putting it Together:

Before launching into a computer-generated example, I need to clear up a wee technicality.  Your computer screen does not create colour in the same way that pigments and dyes do.  I have chosen to ignore this fact for the simple reason that this series is about combining existing coloured objects (ie. yarn and textiles) in harmonious ways, not creating the colours in the first place.  (Though I do salivate at the thought of taking a course in dyeing theory.....)  Therefore, since the point of playing with colour on the computer is to approximate the qualities of coloured objects in order to experiment with arranging them, the technicalities of arriving at that approximation are (mostly) irrelevent.  Enough said.

Here's an example from the colour archive:

 

  One could see this as a rich purple melting into blue, with a tiny splash of the direct complement, orange.  You will also note that the purples and blues range considerably in value and saturation, while the orange is very saturated.

If you leave out the blues, choose the redder of the purples and let in the green of the leaves, a perfect triad emerges.

Now to choose a finite textile colourway.  My personal reaction to the photo is to reject the crocus at the lower right - it looks faded, anemic - what drew me to this cluster was the deep velvety purple one at the upper left, with the tiny orange jewel at its heart.  But would it have the same appeal without the surrounding leaves?

The crocus alone is rich and sophisticated; the leaves add an element of softness and whimsy.  Either one could work beautifully, but I think I'm going to go with the leaves this time.

Going back to the original photo and pulling a palette within the chosen range:

I have pulled up the photoeditor's numerical assignments for each colour, noting the (S)aturation and (V)alue. I don't want to overemphasize the significance of the numbers, given the aforementioned technical limitations of the software, but they do give a nice rough guide to the colour parameters.

Purple:  The predominant purples are of very similar hue, dark and moderately saturated, with small variations in value and saturation creating the subtle streaking.  The petal tips reflect the light, creating high value highlights within the same hue and saturation range.

Orange:  This is an interesting effect - the second, lighter colour is closer to what the eye reads and expects, but the first is what I actually pulled from the photo.  The hue and saturation are the same - only the value differs, likely due to the lack of light on the area.  In combination, the high temperature disparity between warm (orange) and cool (purple) provides plenty of tension and contrast.  The high value orange could be too much, even garish, while the darker version keeps the tension in check. (This is what I mean about learning from nature - it is a clear demonstration of the illusion of warm colours appearing lighter than their actual value.)

Green:  The greens cover a value range similar to the purples, but on the whole are much less saturated, which keeps them quietly in the background, not competing with the main event.

Lessons learned: From a colour wheel perspective, this was a high tension colourway - a triad with maximal disparity between warm and cool.  Strategies for bringing it under control included: desaturating one or more of the hues, and keeping the values similar.  Since the optically dominant hue (orange) is not the main feature of the picture, it was further kept in check by restricting it to a very tiny area.

And that's how I pull apart a colourway.  I don't always check the numerical parameters, but they can be very useful in training the eye to pick up subtleties and illusions that a quick glance will miss.

Translating that into a pattern, and then a textile brings up other fascinating topics such as optical mixing, undertones, neutrals, and the various forms of contrast.  Next time!   

Playing With Colour I

Colour seems to be a topic of both great satisfaction and (at times) great consternation among those of us who create with it: intense delight in a beautiful colourway, intense frustration and needless insecurity in attempting to create that pleasure from scratch. 

Much like food and music, the experience of colour is heavily influenced by cultural conditioning and emotional associations, therefore I don't believe that "rules" can adequately govern such a subjective experience, nor are there Right or Wrong combinations.  There are however, colourways that evoke a desired personal response, or capture the essence of an object or phenomenon more or less successfully, and a basic ability to analyze the attributes of a successful colour or combination can aid immensely in understanding how to create or emulate a particular effect.  I really believe the search for a winning colour "formula" is futile - worse than that, it circumvents a rich world of exploration and mindful seeing.

I suppose I should make the disclaimer that I have no degrees in the arts (just mundane things like microbial genetics and medicine) and I certainly make no claims that this is the only, or even the best way to approach the topic.  All I am really doing is sharing the fruits of a bit of research, and ideas for looking closely at the beauty around you - because I really believe Nature is the best teacher.

Once I declared my intent to write about this, I found it tough to divide the topic into discreet sections, but I thought it made sense to start where I started - and introduce some features of the software tool I use along the way.  PhotoFiltre is a freeware photoeditor (no business association whatsoever - it works, it's available to everyone, the price was right when I needed it.)  The functions and tools I use are very basic, and I'm quite sure are available in most commercial photoediting programs.

So.... let's start with a seemingly simple phenomenon: a clear blue summer sky.

(Simple enough, in fact, to gain ubiquity as a crayon.)

PhotoFiltre has a number of tools in the pull-down "filtre" menu (top row) that are useful for teasing out component colours, but my favorite is the Artistic -> Watercolour -> 1 option.  (Another neat tool is the Stylize -> Mosaic, though I find that a bit rigid.  All a matter of personal choice.)

A slice of sky given the above treatments:

Here's where it gets fun.  Go to the right hand menu column, select the dropper and suck up a colour from your picture.  Open a fresh page (blank page, far left on the horizontal menu), go to filtre -> other -> grid generator, decide how big the squares should be (40 pixels gives a nice chunk of colour) and create your blank palette.  Now back to the vertical menu on the right, select the paint bucket and fill in a square with the colour you just sucked up.  Carry on for as long as you like, sucking up shades from different parts of your photo and dropping them in your palette. (You don't actually have to alter the photo at all before doing this, but I find it helps me to see the component colours more readily.)

What you do with that palette is a topic for another day, but the simple act of creating it will cause you to take a closer look at "common" things.

Some of the loveliest surprises come from subjects normally considered to have lost their beauty, such as these November leaves, long since discarded by their branches and rendered brown and sodden by a week of rain.

Using the watercolour function:

They turn out to be a delicious confection of chocolate and lavender.

Next week: some basic colour theory, and how to play with it onscreen.

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I would love to hear any comments or questions, and please do let me know if I've been unclear about any part of the process. 

Playing With Colour

Early in the life of this blog, I was playing around with my freeware photoeditor (because I couldn't afford PhotoShop - and now I'm undecided anyway), and after pixellating a Saturday Sky photo with the "watercolour" function, was struck by the myriad of different colours that went into a "plain blue" sky.  It didn't take long to wonder what would happen if I pulled out some of those colours and rearranged them into a charted design... and Patterns in Nature was born.  The process of analyzing and playing with the colours in natural objects and phenomena turned out to be a remarkable way to delve into the subject. I find colour theory awfully dry, and the books always seem to present a fabulous finished product to illustrate a double-split-complementary-hexad (or whatever) without ever hinting at how to create a given effect, mood, or feeling from scratch.  I decided that I would take my camera and my own two eyes, and educate myself on my own terms.

I set a goal of creating and blogging a weekly pattern from photographs of my immediate natural environment (studiously resisting the urge to dip into the summer photo stash during the long grey months of mud and slush.) It can take several hours to create a design, depending on the complexity, and except for the fact that I am "colouring" on screen, it is by and large a very human, low-tech process.  I use no "knitting software," I hand pick my colours, and I fill in my charts square by square, click by click. 

It was only ever intended to be a personal challenge, a personal exploration.  Except when a number of kind readers responded to the effort, it started to feel transactional, as though I had something real to offer, which I suppose is the trap goal of blogging.  So today, when someone sent a pile of traffic to my most recent pattern entry solely to illustrate the results (supposedly) achievable with a "submit and click" palette generator, I felt hurt and invalidated   was intrigued.  Is it true?  Is all this analyzing and exploring and creative imagining just a transparently foolish waste of time, duplicable in nanoseconds by a snippet of software?

It was particularly interesting timing, because (partially in response to some reader queries) I was just about to embark on a weekly series of posts outlining my process in detail - tricks for using the photoeditor to explore the attributes and parameters of colour, the (largely human) process of condensing a complex picture into a few suggestive blocks, the specific tenets of FairIsle colour gradients, creating a knittable design from a real object (without resorting to intarsia) - and some liberally illustrated colour theory (it actually does contribute to understanding why one thing works better than another.)

I shall press on for my own academic interest, which is what I started with and is indubitably the soundest motivation, in any case.

(For interest's sake, a side by side (human choice on the left, computer on the right) comparison of the crocus palette may be found here.)