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You are here: Home / All blog posts / Color study: saturation and value
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April 13, 2014 by Tien Chiu

Color study: saturation and value

I’ve been getting progressively grumpier over the last several days, as commitment after commitment kept me from doing anything creative. So when I woke up this morning with nothing on the slate, I rushed out to the loom and started weaving on the color study again. This time I was experimenting with saturation and value. (Value = lightness/darkness; high value = light color, low value = dark.)

Here are today’s samples:

high saturation, medium value
Sample 1: high saturation, medium value
sample 2: low saturation, medium value
sample 2: low saturation, medium value
sample 3: low saturation, low value
sample 3: low saturation, low value

 

sample 4: medium saturation, high value
sample 4: medium saturation, high value

My iPhone unfortunately did not do the best job with colors, but you can see (more or less) that in the first sample, the motif “HI -” jumps out at you. That’s because orange is an advancing color and thus grabs attention, and also because it is highly saturated against a duller background, which also makes it stand out more.

As the color gets less saturated in sample 2, the motif is less obvious. And in sample 3, the color is quite desaturated (the real thing is less red and more brown) and also quite close to the background in value, so it doesn’t stand out nearly as strongly.

In sample #4, saturation isn’t particularly high, but the motif is a very light color, producing high value contrast with the dark background. As a result, the motif stands out clearly.

I still have 11 sections remaining on the color study. My plan is to continue weaving the same motif, varying the color combinations. I can get 3-4 versions of the motif out of each section, so I have (in theory at least) another 44 possible combinations. I considered changing the design as well as the color combinations, but decided there was plenty to explore just in color variations. Also, it will be much quicker to weave if I don’t have to design everything from scratch every time. I’m eager to get the sea turtle warp onto the loom, and experiment with weaving fine threads on Emmy.

And here is our shoe-sniffing Fritz, demonstrating one of his other vices! He is thoroughly addicted to belly rubs, and has been known to pass out from pure pleasure during a belly-rub session. Here Mike is catering to his addiction:

Fritz getting a belly rub
Fritz in the throes of a belly rub

It’s hard to resist a cat that’s begging for belly rubs!

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Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: color study, design

Previous post: A busy day in the dyepots
Next post: Focusing

Comments

  1. Alice says

    April 14, 2014 at 8:26 am

    Such valuable references. This kind of knowledge is to be nailed only by getting in there and DOING it, as you have. They are beautiful, too, a nice bonus. Not sure how helpful your assistants are, though.

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