geeking on color

The dye-lab setup is getting more and more complex. my newest fascination is color theory. I've been reading "Color Works" and "Color in Spinning" by Deb Menz. As a scientist, this "split complimentary" and "double triad" stuff is all new to me. the concepts are not terribly hard to grasp though, and i have a pretty decent eye for color.

I started out with 3 primaries in jacquard dyes: cherry red, sky blue, yellow sun. The colors that i made from those are nice, but the range seemed fairly limited. I was having a hard time getting really vibrant colors like turquoise, lime green, or pink. After reading everything i could find about color mixing, i decided that i needed to go to six primaries so i could mix warm and cool tones of each shade for a little more variety. I purchased Brilliant blue, bright yellow, and fire red; as well as turquoise and brown (still waiting for black to arrive from a backorder). I was very happy with the new range i was able to get from mixing different tones of each color. Still, something seemed strange. Then i found a CMYK color wheel on the clearance table at my local art store. The CMYK model is used in printing when a color is place over white paper, similar to dye on white fiber. Do other dyer's use that system? I asked big orange what he thought, but he lost me when he started in on "subtractive color" vs "additive color" thing. I had turquoise to use as cyan, "yellow sun" as an eye-bleedingly bright yellow, and "fire red" (which is far more 'magenta' than the color chart would lead you to believe). So i thought i'd give it a shot.

WOW! the colors that i get from that experiment are way more vibrant and bright than anything i made before. i made a very bright Kermit-the-frog green and some gorgeous peacock teal/blues/purples that i tried before and couldn't get the way i wanted.

In the end, I just don't have the patience for precision color formulation, a la Deb Menz. Now i am combining RGB and CMYK mixing to get a really wide range of colors and am able to get much closer to the color that i am aiming for.

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