One of my favorite parts of working with a painted warp are coming up with ways to use it on a loom. I have lots of ideas floating around in my head always. However, my children are young, and I haven't had much opportunity to weave with the warps I paint since I started this business. I will get the chance eventually, but for now, here are some ideas and considerations for working with your painted warp.
First and foremost, pay attention to VALUE.
The lightness or darkness of a color or hue is called it’s VALUE.
The lighter the color, the higher the value. For example, Yellow has a higher value than Purple. You change the value of a hue by adding white, grey or black.
Switching to greyscale allows you to see the value of the colors more clearly.
About using your phone to find value: some people will use the black and white filters on their phone cameras to find value. This can be helpful, but it can also be deceiving. Phones have color filters to enhance photo quality, that may produce results that are inaccurate to the actual values.
Four different greyscale filters get four different results.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't use a phone filter to determine color values, but it is something to pay attention to. If values are similar to each other, a phone won't be reliable. But often, especially when picking colors to compliment a painted warp, you're looking for high-contrast values, and a phone camera will usually work for this.
If you want a physical tool, you might look into Red and Green Color Evaluators. These are a common quilting tool for seeing color in greyscale. You can find them as rectangular ruler-sized filters, or as glasses.
Why is Value Important?
You want to choose colors to compliment your warp. My desire is to showcase the painted warp in a weaving, so I do this with high contrast values.
Black and white are the highest contrast values. In the example below, you can see as the grey values get closer to the blue value, the blue becomes less vibrant. If you want your painted warp to stand out, you want the highest contrast value. Perhaps you find your warp is too vibrant? You could lower the value contrast to make the colors more subdued.
I often choose a black or very dark color to contrast my warps.
I like bright colors, and the dark value makes the vibrant colors pop more than white. Midnight, Deep Sea, Amethyst, and Auburn are my current go-to colors for dark values.
Swirling Snowflakes twill pattern, with Amethyst weft as a dark contrast.
Turned Taqueté pattern, with Black in the warp and Deep Sea in the weft as the dark contrast.
Log cabin pattern, which is a color effect using light and dark colors to create the illusion of a pattern. In the warp, the light color is Mardi Gras and the dark color is Black/Midnight. In the weft, the light color is Sea Breeze and the dark color is Black/Midnight. The Sea Breeze color does tone down the Mardi Gras colors a bit, but is similar enough in value. White would have washed out the Mardi Gras colors more.
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Mardi Gras warp in black and white. Mardi Gras is a very vibrant warp. |
Sea Breeze in black and white. It is slightly lighter in value than the warp, and the grey tones make it a bit less vibrant. |