Colour Value and Why it Matters

I started a new project this week. It’s a 2 heddle colour-and-weave project. I picked my colours - I wanted something that looked spring-y after all the snow we have been getting. So dark green, lime green and golden yellow seemed like the right colours.

I warped my loom and started weaving, and almost immediately realised I’d make a serious mistake. My eye had not accurately seen the value of the colours.

What is colour value? Colour value is simply how light or dark a colour is. Not the hue — not whether it’s green or yellow — just how light or how dark it sits on the scale between white and black.

When I picked the colours above, I was thinking about Spring and what looked great together. When we look at colours, this is generally what we are looking at — not value. And for most projects this works fine. But not with colour and weave. In a colour-and-weave pattern, all the pattern comes from the contrast of the colours — and this is where colour value really matters.

Our eyes see colour clearly, but we can train our eyes to look for tone as well. The chart to the right shows a tonal chart. Since colour and weave depends entirely on contrast, we need to use tones that are not close to each other on this chart.

I *thought* I had done this while picking colours. I thought the lime green and the golden yellow had different values…but I didn’t check.

How do you check? Grab your phone and take a picture. Then go to edit mode and change the picture to greyscale. Had I done that, I would have quickly realized that the colours are almost identical in tone. The green and yellow were not a good choice for colour and weave. However, I could have used the dark green with either of the other colours.

I also noticed — too late — that if I had compared two strands side by side instead of whole skeins, I would have seen it more clearly. The brightness of the yellow tricked my eye into thinking it was darker than it really is.

So, what am I going to do? I’m going to keep weaving. I can only see the pattern now because I know it’s there. But when I take a picture and turn it to greyscale, I can see the pattern - a little. I’m hoping that after the scarf comes off the loom and is wet finished the colours will pop a little more and I’ll have a subtle but visible pattern.

Regardless, I wanted to try the Malabrigo Lace in a 2-heddle plain weave project. I have a threading sequence I like and the next one I weave I’ll try a different combination and pay more attention to value!