Some of this blog is from an earlier blog, Thermal Shock: Shocking Color Choices. I adapted it to the piece I’m currently working on. The principles are the same.
One of the hardest things in embroidery work is to get over the match instinct. After years of perfectly matching thread to my project, I’ve had to learn to pick out the highest contrast threads to make an image that really shows up.
In embroidery, contrast is everything. If the color all mushes together, then you have a very mushy image indeed. Smooth color exchanges that are analogous and sit next to each other on the color wheel are pretty. But they don’t have much punch. So what you want is color that builds not on similarities but on differences. There are several kind of contrast: color, tone, clarity, and temperature.
Today we’re talking about color, which is simply the hue. Is it red, blue, or yellow? Or an odd shade of green? It’s not a simple as it looks. There a million reds, blues and yellows and they are not the same.
Thermal shock is about the temperature of a color. Every color, no matter whether it is a cool or warm color, leans either towards having a cool or warm cast. It doesn’t matter if it’s a cool color or a warm color. There are cool yellows, there are hot blues. If all the colors are either cool or warm they’ll flow into each other like analogous colors. But if they’re not? You get thermal shock. Like standing in a cold water sprinkler on a steaming hot day. The effect is kind of visually electric.
Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green is an excellent book discussing thermal variations and how that creates differing colors. It’s about paint mixing, but it translates easily to thread blending.
Essentially, this phoenix is red and blue; I don’t much like working in primaries. I find it boring. But I was working on a complement to another quilt. I wanted to do the wind/bird version of it. Decerning color is deceptive before you’ve finished blending all the colors together, but I found this discouraging.
Upstream is another oriental quilt of mythic proportions, also in reds and blues. I wanted to do a wind/bird companion piece to it.
Both pieces are essentially red and blue. I don’t like working in primaries. I find it boring. But those oriental pieces feature a lot of blue and red. It’s a good stretch for me. The colors are smooth and analogous. But they don’t pack much punch.
That got better as I finished filling in. Building color in threadwork is done shade by shade, one color on top of another. The eye mixes those colors, which keeps them clear and crisp. What makes thread work exciting is contrast. And in this case, I went for thermal shock. I chose a hot gold to outline and detail all those cool reds and blues
They’re both primary pieces. But that hot gold makes them shimmer.
Other blogs discussing color
I write alot about color. Here’s some other blogs on it.
Canva has an excellent tool for picking colors that’s fun to play with.
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