Quilting in Colour: value, saturation, and contrast

Hello Friends and Welcome Back!

During the first week of this colour series, we took a look at the colour wheel; the primary, secondary, and tertiary colours, and the variety of different colour schemes that could be created by using them. Check out week 1 of Quilting in Colour to learn more!

But as we all know, those bright, vibrant colours aren’t the only ones that exist, and certainly aren’t the only ones used in quilts. In this week’s exploration of colour, we will be delving into the ways that value and saturation affect the appearance of a quilt and are used to create contrast!

Just as a reminder Friends, this series focuses primarily on the use of different colours in quilting, these same theories of colour can be applied to quilting, garment sewing, drawing, and any other activity that uses colour.

Colour Terms

Now that we’ve established the different colours that can be used, we need to talk a little about colour manipulation. We won’t be physically changing the colours of our fabric, just examining the different effects that can be achieved by using fabric that has been dyed using different values and saturation.

Value

Value refers to the lightness or darkness of a colour. When used together, colours with light and dark value create a lot of contrast and can make a pattern really stand out. We experimented with value briefly last week while exploring monochromatic colour schemes, here are a few examples:

When using a monochromatic colour scheme, the differences in value are fairly obvious just by looking. However, comparing the value of different fabrics is a little more challenging, especially in the cases of patterned fabrics, and more so if the pattern uses a variety of colours.

There’s a trick that many quilt makers use to determine the value of a fabric in cases like these; greyscale photography. By changing all the colours to grey, it becomes much easier to see the differences in value.

Most smartphones offer a greyscale filter, which can be found in the image edit menu of the gallery app. Make sure that you're using a proper greyscale filter though, as some alternative black and white filters will alter the values and not present a realistic image.

In the centre, you can see the proper greyscale image. The other two images show the effect of some alternate black and white filters. While they work well enough, they do change the value of some of the fabric samples; the filter on the left darkens many of the values, while the filter on the right lightens them.

Saturation

Saturation refers to the amount of pure colour that is visible. Highly saturated colours are very bright and vibrant, like those featured on the colour wheel. These colours will draw the eye and tend to create strong emotional responses.

By contrast, colours with low saturation are much less vibrant. They are softer and create a resting place for the eye. Many unsaturated colours are considered neutral; they contain so little of a particular colour that they lose the characteristics of that colour, and can exist harmoniously with everything.

Neutrals are really important in quilting as they help to break up large areas of intense colour, and are able to create contrast without creating colour conflict.

The most common neutrals are black, white, grey, and brown, but any colour can become neutral if they've been desaturated far enough.

Here are a few samples showing colours with varying levels of saturation:

To the left, the colours have been desaturated so far as to turn grey.

Combining Saturation and Value

Now that we understand them separately, we should also look at the ways saturation and value work together. They can be used in conjunction to make a variety of unique colours, and to create colour families. Here are a few examples:

These colours have a light value and medium saturation. They are often referred to as pastels, and are commonly associated with springtime, babies, and other forms of new life.

These next colours have light to medium value and high saturation. Bright colours like these speak to the most vibrant times in life; bright summer flowers, the energy of youth, and create a sense of joy and excitement.

Now we'll look at some darker values, with high saturation. These colours create a sense of mystery, an expression of the unknown and depending on what colours are used as accents, can create an experience of dread, or one of excitement and intrigue.

Of course, your colours don't have to tell a story, you can also pick colours just because you like them!

These are some colours that I really like. They don't follow any particular formula of value or saturation, but to me, they feel familiar and significant.

Value, Saturation, and the Colour Wheel

It's time to put together the things we've discussed so far. Last week, we were making colour schemes using the highly saturated, medium value colours found on the colour wheel, this week, we've learned to manipulate those colours. The next step is to create some colour schemes that use value and saturation.

Adding a Neutral

This can be done in a few different ways; one option is to add a neutral colour to an existing colour scheme. This prevents bright colours from overwhelming the underlying pattern in the piecing, but also enhances the colours so that they look their best.

A really common way of doing this is to use a neutral colour in the background, while featuring the desired colour scheme in the foreground piecing. This distribution of colour is often seen on traditional quilts, usually using white, ivory, and beige tones.

In my version of the Love-in-the-Mist pattern by Persimmon Quilts, I used a violet and yellow complementary colour scheme and a neutral background. But instead of a light colour, I opted for a dark charcoal grey-black background. This created a more modern effect than a light background would have, and really emphasized the yellow piecing.

You could also choose to add multiple neutrals to create additional visual interest or visual tension. The choice you make will depend entirely on the feeling you want for your quilt. For example, when planning the colours I wanted to use for Love-in-the-Mist, I briefly considered a two tone background.

From this sketch, you can see that using both a dark and light background would have created a lot of additional contrast. This contrast, combined with the contrast between the yellow and violet, would have made the quilt top very busy, and would distract from the details in the pieced blocks.

Visual tension generally creates a lot of conflict and busyness in traditional quilt patterns, but is fairly common in modern patterns. For example, my Changing Pace quilt:

Here, I've used a monochrome red accent colour, and combined two neutrals, black and white, to create a pattern in the background. This works well for a few reasons, first, the monochrome colour palette doesn't have a lot of contrast, so it's not fighting the contrast in the background. Second, the limited amount of piecing results in a lot of negative background space, which the two tone background breaks up into more interesting shapes.

Adjusting the Value and Saturation

Value and saturation can also be adapted into existing colour schemes by adjusting the original colours. Changing the level of saturation and value for each colour can produce a variety of different effects.

The above variations all originate from the same analogous colour scheme, but each produce a slightly different effect. These effects range from the bright, citrus-y colours of the original colour scheme, to earth tones, to pastels.

I used this technique while making my own version of Kimberly Einmo's Pleasantville pattern. My base colours are a triadic colour scheme using red, blue, and yellow.

The yellow is used as the background, but has really low saturation and light value, resulting in a beige colour. The red and blue both have a medium to dark value and medium to high saturation. The combination of these colours produces an interesting effect; while there is not a lot of contrast between the blues and reds, they stand out a lot from the yellow in the background. And the overall desaturation of colours produces a worn, homey, nostalgic sort of feeling, especially in the context of a traditional style row quilt.

Accent Colours

Saturation and value can also be used to accent certain colours. If a single colour in a colour scheme were left vibrant and highly saturated, it would stand out from others that have been desaturated. This also works the other way, a single low saturated colour among a rainbow of highly saturated colours will stand out.

And again, this can be applied to value. A single light value colour will stand out against colours of darker value and vice versa.

This is a technique that I haven't really tried before, but I would love to experiment with in the future.

Creating Colour Contrast

Talking about colour schemes last week and colour manipulation this week, I have been constantly referencing contrast. Above all, contrast is probably the most important thing to understand with respect to colour.

Contrast encourages certain elements of a design or pattern to stand out. It is used for emphasis, clarity, and to create depth. However, you can also intentionally remove contrast from certain areas to create the opposite effect.

Here's an example of a composition of colours that create a lot of contrast and make the underlying block pattern really stand out:

It uses the contrast between the colours to produce a really dynamic effect with a lot of visual tension and clearly defined shapes. The resulting quilt would be very bright and playful.

You can use value and saturation to create an equally high contrast version of the same pattern.

This sample has a lot of contrast, but because of the way the colours have been manipulated, they produce much less visual tension. These colours are much more worn-looking and nostalgic than the previous example.

But value and saturation can be manipulated to create low contrast too. A great example is this desaturated, pastel sample:

This uses light value colours, usually with low saturation, to create a very beautiful, almost lace-like effect. It is much more subtle and causes the block pattern to recede.

Regardless of how you choose to use them, the colours you select for your quilt need to produce enough visual interest to look good from both far away and close up. This draws in viewers and encourages them to look closer so they can also appreciate all the smaller details of your work.

I would encourage you to experiment with some of your favourite colour schemes from last week, or to create some new ones! Play around with the level of contrast, creating some colour schemes with lots of contrast, and some with very little. Experiment with the effects of neutral colours, and with the level of saturation and value. Above all, have fun, try new things, and learn which colours you enjoy working with!

Friends, I hope all of you have had as much fun talking about colour this week as I have. I really enjoyed looking back at some of my past projects and revisiting the decisions I made regarding colour scheme, use of neutrals, and the different effects I considered using.

Once again, I would love to see what you create during your colour experiments! Please share photos of your favourite colour schemes in the comments below, or email me through my contact page! You can also share them in my Facebook group or tag me on Instagram @vafibrearts!

Please visit me again next week for the conclusion of the quilting in colour series. We'll be finding other sources of inspiration to borrow colour schemes from, making it really easy to create something beautiful!

Until then Friends,

VA