Guest Posting- Let's Talk About Neutrals!

Today I have a guest post on Modern Quilters Ireland talking about background colours and neutral colours that I thought might be of interest to you.  It's a short post so I'm re-posting it here too!

Let's talk about neutrals!

In modern quilting, neutral background colours are often white and grey.  Kona White, Snow and Bone being really popular in the whites and Kona Ash being the most popular grey.

In the colour intensive course I did with Stiched in Color, Rachel Hauser gave us White, Black, Grey and Brown toned colours as neutrals.  Some of those tones are cream, champagne, beige, and tan.  I know modern quilters usually shy away from brown but when used with bright colours like yellow or neon green it can really work!  Try thinking of brown as dark orange and maybe you might use it a bit more?

Instead of the starkness of black I have loved using Kona Navy and for a while seemed to making only navy based quilts!

From time to time I get bored with solids and go low volume too for a change - I think low volumes fall into the neutral category! 

This past year I have really enjoyed playing with colour trying out Charcoal, Iron & Steel, Orange, pale Blues like Fog or Cotton Sky and even loved the darker purple-grey colour of Smoke.

I stumbled across a free download by Lila Rogers of Make Art that Sells and she identified the neutral colours to include that ground artwork as:
• Cool grey
• Orange
• Cream
• Navy
• Black
• Sky grey-blue
• Olive
• Red

I am happy to say that in the last year most of these I had tried but not Olive or Red.  I'm liking the look of Olive so maybe that might be the next colour exploration.  What about you - any go to neutral you use all the time for your quilt backgrounds?  Tempted to try any of these?

Colour theory

Two of the free programmes that we are exploring in Stiched In Color's class, Color Intensive, are the Palette Builder by Play Crafts and Kuler (also available in an app) by Adobe.  I've been having great fun with them, getting carried away to be honest!

One of our tasks was to make a mosaic colour wheel and to have fun exploring colour schemes.  I loaded my mosaic into the Palette Builder and it picked out the following colours automatically. 

You can move the selections around and set it to match your picks to Kona colours and add in some more  up to 10 selections.  I absolutely love this program!

The Adobe Kuler website allows you to play with the colour wheel and use colour schemes to build a palette, like complimentary (opposites on the colour wheel e.g. green+red) or analogous (next to each other on the colour wheel)

or triadic (3 points equidistant from each other).  I love how this last one just jumps out especially the blue/greens. 

In addition you can pick odd combinations like compound or do your thing in a custom setting.

If you want to adjust a colour you can click on it to highlight it and use the sliders to change the hue and the saturation.  It's great fun!  You can save your palette and share it with others  and explore what others have done. There is also an option to add a photo similar to PlayCrafts and pull colours out so I did it again with my mosaic above.

The programme can automatically pull colours from your image and you can play around with them in edit mode. 

And if you want to know what Kona colours these correspond to you can grab a screenshot and up load that to Palette Builder! 

Colour choice is a very personal thing.  You may have noticed I've been using lots of blue lately!  I've tried hard above to try and use other colours and I had tons of fun!  Next time you are looking for colour inspiration why not try the Palette Builder or the Kuler website, or both? 

And I just couldn't resist leaving you with this!  Not sure I'll ever make anything with this many browns but I really like that Windsor Blue.  There's no hope for me!