Colour Value

November 21, 2014

Four feet of snow has fallen this week and as I write this our roof is already being shoveled in anticipation of the forecasted rain showers tomorrow.  In the over 30 years we have lived here, we have never seen this much snow this early before.  A month until the official start to winter and already we are battling the constant squalls and snowfall. Unfortunately, my broken ankle means I am of no help when it comes to snow removal.

Looking at colour and value

Last post I talked a bit about fabric colours when making the background.  Quilters know that colour value (the lightness or darkness of a colour) is also very important to a pleasing finished product. If you have too much of one value or none of another, your landscape may seem flat and lifeless. There should be lights, mediums and darks in every piece but they don't have to be in the same amount, just ensure that each value is represented.  Painters can mix white and black to colours to change the values, but quilters don't have that luxury.

 When I am getting ready to make a new landscape I gather the fabrics I want to use in piles. I try to determine if my colour choices are going to work  (see last blog post on the colour wheel) and if I have a selection of colour values.

See the yellow peeking out?  The piece I am going to being working on is a winter snow scene in a forest snowshoeing  at night.  Snow is cold and the colour of the sky is cold (blue) so I knew that I would need something to warm the scene up.  Yellow or orange seemed reasonable.  You will note that I have light (whites for the snow), medium (light greys that will be tree trunks) and darks (the blues for the night sky and dark tree trunks.  I know that I will have to adjust as I go but this is a pretty good start.

When I think about snow I think about all the colours that I see.  The shadows are often purplish and blueish hues and the white is never all the same colour of white.  I want to represent this in my landscape.  Unfortunately a photo does not show you all the different whites I have piled together and then sewn to make the snow look shadowy.

Playing with the scene before sewing it down

The idea for a winter snow scene came to yesterday when I posted a photograph of a landscape quilt with a skier and a dog in the foreground on FB (see image at the top of the Blog post).  Immediately a friend commented that she wanted a snowshoer in a similar scene.  I couldn't fall asleep last night as I first envisioned this landscape and then thought my way through how to do it.  I started this evening, but its far from finished.  You will see that I spend quite a bit of time playing before I commit fabric to the sewing machine.

As I played with the fabrics and the scene I had in my head I realized that the background sky should probably be consistent right across the picture.  I also knew that the trees needed to be more organic and less straight.  The orange was changed to yellow, which seemed more pleasing and bright.  I was hoping that the little bits of purples and yellows would look like abstract shadows.

It starts to come together

I am always anxious to get sewing.  Notice that I decided to run strips of yellow moonlight on one side of the trees as I get closer to where the main hit of yellow (the moon) will be.  I plan on having a snowshoer in the foreground looking up at the moon dancing among the tree trunks. I feel like the shadows on the snow are having the abstract effect I wanted.

See if these couple of pictures will help you understand how I attach the snow bottoms to the tree trunks and night sky.