The Language of Color

Pink is soft, comforting, gentle; red is bold, dangerous, alarming and dramatic. Blue is calm, serious, suggesting allegiance and loyalty. Yellow and green remind us of springtime, newness, happiness. Pantone.com is a color monitoring site that predicts the fashion hues of each season. The Pantone prime color of 2014 is called Radiant Orchid, red toned down with a little blue. Mixing colors relieves their seriousness and sends your emotions in a new direction.

Color can be a shortcut for words and it can be a language all its own. People with hearing deficiencies have to get their clues from color. Traffic light colors are a good example. People with sight deficiencies cannot get clues from colors. They have to rely on sound or touch.
Color can say a lot about a person or an object. When I teach quilt making I point out that light colors come forward to the eye and dark colors recede from the eye. That is why fashion designers use light colors to emphasize some figure assets and dark colors to disguise others. If you want a certain part of a design emphasized, use a light color, and surround it with a contrasting dark color. When mixing colors dark will dominate so be careful how much you mix in-painters know this only too well.

Radiant orchid is a strong color but with light highlights. It seems to glow on the surface. Use it in a place you want to emphasize but not as glitz. It is not silly. It is elegant but light-hearted.
Science tells us that the perception of color is a function of light radiating back into the eye. Colors will change to us depending on the amount of light they are receiving and the focus of our eyes. Warn your buyers that the colors represented on the computer screen may not be identical to the true colors, especially that different computer screens can represent colors differently and try to photograph your listings with as much natural light as possible.
Be careful with color. Its language can suggest something you may not have meant. There is a lot to learn about the world of color. Classes, books, observation, experiment. They can all help to fine tune your color speech.

Written by Susan from Ten Thousand Threads

Tags: Handmade, handmade colors, handmade quilt, purple, purple handmade, quilt

Posted in Creative Breakroom, Handmade Harbor