Watermelon, Turquoise, and Slate

12 Part Color Wheel

This color wheel I drew for a paper I wrote a couple of years ago, done in colored pencil. The "mask" or pointers point to a tetrad color combination. The colors here are at full saturation for colored pencils.

In the last post I talked about hue, saturation, and value as aspects of color. Hue is the name of the color, for instance red, blue, or yellow. In English we have only eleven color names. All the rest of the colors are descriptions of the nine. So we have red, blue, yellow, green, orange, violet, pink, brown, and gray, white, and black. So watermelon red is a description of a particular pinky-red. Turquoise blue is a tag telling us where the blue mineral was mined and named. Purple describes the dye that is extracted from a certain eastern Mediterranean mollusk. Gray, black, and white are not considered hues at all, but merely darks and lights that can be used with any hue. In a sense, though, they are also "color" words.

Saturation is how much color or pigment is in a hue. The hues of the familiar twelve-part color wheel are supposed to always be at maximum saturation. Other words used also for saturation are intensity and chroma. So a color of low saturation would be slate blue, that is, a blue with a lot of gray added. The blueness of slate blue is less vivid or less intense than the full blue of the color on the color wheel.

Pastels are colors that are less intense. Pastel crayons are pure pigments that are bound together with gum or some other adhesive. These crayons have a beautiful light translucence to them. We think of pastels as tints of hues. Tints are hue with white added, so by definition tints have less chroma than the full hue. So now think of value that we talked about in the previous post. Value is how light or dark a color is. So a pastel color, for instance baby pink, is a red hue (after all, pink is red with a lot of white added), of low saturation, and a light value. So we have described the color!

Using only pastels in an article of embroidery, say a baby sampler, can be a problem. Light, delicate colors do seem just right for a baby, but if only light, delicate colors are used, then from a distance our sampler looks like gray-pink mud. For a sampler that people can actually see from five feet away, darks as well as lights should be used.

I do a lot of manipulating of photographs on my computer. One of the things I can do is to "super saturate" a photo. This mean that light can be packed in so that our normal color wheel hues, the ones that are supposed to be at full saturation already, are really bright. I have noticed that a couple TV shows shoot all their scenes in super-saturated mode. I see this most in CSI Miami (a show that I am not fond of, but not because of the super-saturation). Saturation is fun to play with in light on the computer, but as we stitch

"Merci Beaucoup"

4.5" X 6"

This is the original saturation of colors.

with our threads, it is almost impossible to achieve. And I am sure that I wouldn't like to see a lot of my stuff super-saturated anyway. After a while it has a decidedly artificial look to it.

"Merci Beaucoup"

4.5" X 6"

A small sampler done on perforated paper with Impressions threads.

This image has been artificially super-saturated