I Love Hue Too!

I think I’ve always been fairly sensitive to nuances of color, but lately I’ve been particularly tuned in to subtle variations of tonalities in my world. I’ve been teaching my Double Rainbow workshop on zoom nearly every week this year, so color is something that I’m thinking about and exploring all the time.

I know that there are many websites out there these days that can help you work out color schemes on your computer, whether it is scanning in an image from nature, dropping in colors that you want to work with, automatically creating a plaid design, or whatever it may be. I find that I’m not inclined to approach designing with color on my computer, but prefer to go straight to my shelves of yarn for inspiration.

Lately, however, I find I’ve become rather addicted to spending time with some color apps on my tablet. Huedoku, Chromatic, and I Love Hue are the ones that I have gone down the rabbit hole with, and am sure there are many others out there. They are each a little different, but each involve starting with a color gradation in a matrix, scrambling it up, and then trying to put it back in order. You can choose the level of difficulty of the matrix, the level of clues you get to work with, and the particular colorway you want to work with.

This doesn’t sound or look too difficult at first glance, but it is amazing how challenging it can be. Here is a fairly simple, but really beautiful 5x5 color grid -

How hard can that be, right? Yet, when the squares of color get scrambled up, with no clues as to where to begin it can be pretty baffling -

Turn that into a 10x12 full spectrum grid and you have a stunning array of color -

Now scramble that up, and where do you begin? The only clues here are the pairs of black dots on each side of the matrix.

Rather than just guessing at where to put the individual squares of color and moving them around until they finally fall into the right places, I try to really look closely at each one and determine whether it is a little warmer or a little cooler, more saturated or a little more toned down.

Some of the apps tell you when you get a square back in its correct position. Other ones don’t let you know until you get every one of them right. Some of them tell you how many moves it took you to complete the puzzle and let you know how you stack up to the worldwide average.

I live in the high desert landscape of New Mexico, where colors in the environment tend to be very subtle. When I travel to other parts of the country or the world I am often immediately struck by how green it is or how bright the flowers are, and I love being immersed in all that color. Then when I fly home and make the drive from Albuquerque to Santa Fe everything looks so drab and colorless. Yet in another day or so I find myself tuning in once again to the subtle differences in the landscape and find myself appreciating the beauty in that subtlety.

Here is a 5x5 grid of neutral tones, scrambled up and then put back in order -

Wouldn’t that make a beautiful weaving? Here is another matrix in a narrower, and stunningly beautiful range of the spectrum -

And notice how the little squares don’t appear to be one solid color, but shift subtly from one side to the other as they are affected by their neighboring squares. And yet scramble them up and suddenly they change in appearance and become much harder to distinguish.

To me color is endlessly fascinating and fun to play with. I consider color to be an embodiment and manifestation of the life force in the universe, much as I consider music to be.

As I spend time with these color puzzles I find myself becoming more finely tuned in to nuances of color all around me.

Ella Bella lounging on the bedroom carpet

I do find that I have to be careful to watch my time when I start exploring these color apps. Even though I can justify this as being ‘research’ for my weaving and classes, it’s rather startling when I look up at the clock and discover that it’s 2:00 in the morning. I highly recommend trying these out if you’d like to develop your own sensitivity to color, but I do have to warn you that this can be very habit-forming!