Have you ever mixed colors and gotten a surprise? I've been doing some color studies to learn more and to get the hues I want for my series. One of the hues I want to get with Procion MX dyes is a mustard hue. I know that they sell a dye color called mustard and it looks close to the hue I want to achieve, but I'm trying to make my colors by using the colors I already have. I'm in the mode of using what I have before I buy more. And theoretically, I should be able to get a nice mustard by mixing the right proportions of purple and yellow. I proved this with a paint study I did. I made a color wheel on watercolor paper and then started with pure yellow at the top and added purple paint little by little and painted a space at the bottom of the wheel with as neutral a color I could get with yellow and purple mixed. On another wheel, I painted purple at the top and went towards the same neutral color at the bottom. Here are the two wheels of reducing color saturation or intensity.
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| intensity wheels |
I used Profab opaque textile paint for these. As you can see, I got some nice mustard colors in the top wheel. So I thought if I took Procion Sun Yellow dye (which is the same hue as the yellow paint) and Procion Grape dye (which is the same hue as the purple paint) and mixed them, I would get close to the same hues on the fabric that I got on the paper.
As you can guess, that's not how it came out. Here are the results on cotton broadcloth.
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| Yellow with Grape added |
The yellows turned more green as I added grape.
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| Grape with yellow added |
The purples aren't too far off the paint samples, just lighter. Isn't it interesting how the paint samples compare to the dye samples? It's all about chemistry. How the dyes react with each other and with the fabric. On silk, it would look even different. Bottom line, I'm still working on mixing mustard. I came close with bronze dye and tangerine, but the tangerine splits out a little too much and gives orange streaks.
So while I'm working on that, I've started one of the pieces in the series, because I did successfully come up with the blue-gray that I wanted. And this week brought good news. I sold my piece Inner Balance 2 to a doctor. He asked me what I did for a living and I told him I was a fiber artist and gave him my elevator speech about art quilts and what I do. He was interested so on my second visit, I took two of my works to show him in person what an art quilt looks like. He bought one of them. What a nice surprise.
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| Inner Balance 2 |
The other good news is that my piece Rise was juried into SAQA's exhibit Growth. It will be in
Dunedin Fine Art Center from June 9 - August 18 in Dunedin, Florida.
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| Rise |
So I'm continuing with my color studies and creating a wealth of a dye notebook and working on paint studies, too. There is so much to learn about color and I'm finding it fascinating. I'm linking this with
Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.
