The Bees Reprise

The Bee Sampler (completed)

The wings are still light gray.

There are thirteen types of flowers that the bees are tending to.

For various reasons I am again looking at color in order to write about it and presumably teach it further down the line. And again I am struck by the power of value in any color composition.

Value is how light or dark a color is. For instance with the color blue, baby blue has a light value and navy blue has a very dark value. Easy enough.

In color theory, any color can be described by naming iits three of attributes. Hue is the name of the color it is, red, blue, orange, etc. Saturation is the amount of pigment in any color, or how colorful a color is. Lipstick red is more saturated than baby pink. Other words for saturation are intensity and chroma. And value, of course is how light or dark the color is. So lipstick red is red with high saturation and a medium value, being neither very dark or very light.

I have heard it said that the untrained human eye can see only four values in a composition at a time--the lightest, the darkest, and two middle values. If this is true, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, then we as artists, designers, and stitchers must get the values right in order to show the composition at its best.

In an earlier post I put up an embroidery of bees. My sister, Albie Merrill, suggested that the bees wings were not dark enough and she was right. I was not seeing the design because of my emotional involvement in it. I was still "seeing" what was in my mind it should look like, not what it really looked like. Look at the two bee embroideries next to one another and see the difference value makes. I changed from a light gray thread to a black thread to outline the bees's wings.

PJ's Bees

The upper example has the restitched wings, from light gray to black outlining.

The lower example shows the original gray. Of course this no longer exists except in electrons.

My friend Rita Curry-Pittman noticed that I had the same light gray wings on the now-completed sampler. She told me to change that as soon as I could. I have not yet gotten around to it, but here is the (almost) completed sampler that I showed just in the beginning phase in an earlier post.

So I guess I have two points to make in this post. One is that value has to be carefully considered in each composition. If something in the composition is a little off, it may be that a value is wonky and needs amending. Value is a powerful force within design. The other is that most artists need a cooling off period from their artwork in order to see it unemotionally. My cooling off period can be as long as a couple of months. If I have the time, I like to put a completed picture away for a period of time. When I bring it out again I can look at it with new eyes.