90 Shades of Grey
Most of the weaving that I’ve done over the past several years has focused on exploring color rotations in doubleweave in a system that I call Double Rainbow. I've worked with color wheel hues in saturated colors, tints, tones and shades. I’ve expanded the traditional color wheel to work with up to twenty colors in one piece and I’ve created designs with up to eight blocks of doubleweave. I’ve experimented with different weights of yarns and various fibers. It seems that no matter what the variables are, it’s always interesting and always fun.
When I teach my Double Rainbow workshop we have a session for an hour or two where we talk about color theory. Of all the characteristics of color, the one that seems the most challenging to get a handle on is value. As one of my students asked, ‘What is the value of value?’. Well, there is actually a lot of value in value. It’s what our eyes register first, even though our minds tend to think in terms of the hue, or the name of the color. It has a lot to do with the mood of a piece, and whether it feels soft and gentle, or whether it has high contrast and drama. And it has a lot to do with whether colors in a weaving show well against each other or whether they disappear or turn to mud.
I’ve been thinking that an interesting exercise would be to set up a warp in a rotation of pure values from white through different shades of grey to black, and then to weave it with the same shaft and layer combinations as I do when working with the hues of the spectrum. I chose six of the seven cones from Lunatic Fringe’s Gray Matters set in 10/2 perle cotton. Two of the light greys in the set are very close in value and I thought the transition was more even if I used just one of them, and then the sampler would correspond to the six primary and secondary colors that I use for the Double Rainbow sampler.
As I set out the six cones of yarn, I realized that, aside from the absence of hue, this warp would work quite differently than when I work with six colors. The six primary and secondary colors can be arranged sequentially into a circle so that the rotation flows naturally from one color to the next, as they do in a color wheel.
When the cones of yarn with the six values are arranged in a circle, however, there is a big jump from white, the highest value, to black, the lowest value. So be it - let’s just see what happens!
I followed the same sequencing that I do when weaving a Double Rainbow sampler with six colors on four shafts - six different color rotation blocks in the warp, six different color rotations in the weft, and six different layer combinations that are possible with four shafts. You end up getting a total of 216 little color blocks in the sampler, but a number of the color combinations that appear in one section of the sampler appear in another place in another section of the sampler. So there is duplication of color combinations, but you still end up with a total of 90 distinct color combinations.
Because I used the same parameters with the six neutrals, there ended up being 90 shades of grey in the sampler. None of them are solids - they are all a combination of two or three of the tones blending with each other.
Since my weaving has always focused on color, and lots of color gradation, I expected this sampler to be interesting, but maybe kind of visually boring. As I wove section by section I was amazed to see how beautiful all the subtle nuances of grey were.
Looking at the finished sampler I started imagining a larger piece with a composition built upon the ideas that were generated by the sampler, and I will probably work on developing that idea soon.
But first, I still had a couple yards of warp left on the loom, and started to think about other ideas that I could experiment with. Stay tuned for my next blog, 105 Tones of Grey…