Color Chords Make Your Warp Sing!

Pictured above, "Tesselations": an eight-shaft design on a four-color Echo threading. This is one of the samples I'm weaving up for "Echo and Jin: Playing with Color Chords," a workshop I'm teaching at the MAFA (Mid-Atlantic Fiber Association) 2023 conference in June in Millersville, PA.

Weavers will choose their warp colors based on the theories of "color chords" presented by Johannes Itten, author of The Art of Color and The Elements of Color. Many consider him to be the 20th century's master of color theory. 

In addition, The Color Star (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,1985) is a tool for color study based on Itten's theory of color harmony and his 12-point color wheel. The kit (not really a book) includes eight templates that outline a series of chords of his color star. As an example, looking at the photo at the top of this post: The colors of the warp yarns (in 10/2 mercerized cotton) are bright green, orange, burgundy, and royal blue. Together, they form a rectangle, a quadratic chord, on Itten's color star.

The full complement of templates, placed over the color wheel and cycled around the wheel, are as follows:

1) Dyadic chords, the six sets of complementary colors: yellow and violet, yellow/orange and blue/violet, orange and blue, red/orange and blue/green, red and green, and red/violet and yellow-green.

A dyadic chord showing the complementary colors yellow and violet

2) Triadic chords that form either an isosceles triangle or an equilateral triangle on the color wheel. An isosceles triangle will give you four color chords, among them the primary colors of yellow, red, and blue and the secondary colors of orange, violet, and green. 

Triadic chord: an isosceles triangle showing the primary colors

Triadic chords can also be equilateral triangles that yield twelve chords, a.k.a. split complementaries.

Triadic chord showing the split complementaries of yellow, blue/violet, and red/violet. This chord is useful if you're choosing colors for a two-end parallel threading and its accompanying weft -- although if I had a warp of royal blue and magenta I would choose a darker shade of yellow, something more like bronze, because yellow can overwhelm other colors.

3) Quadratic chords that are either a square or a rectangle on the color wheel. (I consider this the barbership quartet of Itten's color theory, which I'm certain would not amuse him.) This is the main part of my subject matter for the MAFA workshop.

Here's an example of a square quadratic chord of warp-color choices, starting at the top left and going clockwise around the wheel: lime green, orange, wine, and royal blue. Unfortunately I didn't line up my yarn cones in that order, but you get the idea....

Here's what those colors look in black and white, defining their relative values:

Predictably, the deep wine color has the darkest value and the orange has the lightest value. Here's an 8-shaft sample woven up with these warp colors, using a turquoise weft.

And here's what this sample looks like in black and white, showing the different values of the color blends:

The darkest values, outlining the motifs in the pattern, are where the turquoise crosses the wine and the royal-blue warps, which stands to reason based on the black-and-white photo of the warp yarns.

Looking again at the sample at the beginning of this post: The warp yarns I used are bright green, orange, burgundy, and royal blue. Together, these colors form a rectangular quadratic chord on Itten's color wheel. 

Here's a black and white photo showing the values of these colors. You'll see that the burgundy on the bottom left of the photo has the darkest value and the orange on the bottom right has the lightest value.

The different values shape the pattern, defining the forms and adding depth. The burgundy adds a shadow, almost an outline, while the orange/yellow appears to sit on top of the sample. 

4) Itten's five-tone chords combine the equilateral and isosceles triangles. These templates are useful when you're creating a four-color parallel threading, for instance, and you're looking for ideas for weft colors as well.

Five-tone color chord of green, yellow/green, red/orange, blue/violet, and blue

5) Finally, there are two different six-tone chords that are revealed by rotating a hexagonal template on the color wheel, the first one giving you two six-tone chords, each consisting of three complementary colors. Both templates in this category use two equilateral triangles: the first one has all colors equidistant from each other, giving you four different chords to choose from, and the second combines two equilaterial triangles to form an irregular hexagon. These two templates are useful in choosing warp and weft colors for Echo woven as doubleweave, where you have four colors in the warp and two colors in the weft. 

Using a hexagonal template for a six-tone chord, I've chosen warp colors that form a trapezoid on the six-tone template -- suggesting, for doubleweave, I should try orange/yellow or blue/green in the weft.

A plug for subjective color choices: Here's a Jin sample where I went rogue and, weaving with the warp colors above, chose hot pink as the weft. Further, I used a wool/stainless-steel yarn in the weft, which gives the fabric pleats (how firm or soft depends on how you shape it, because the stainless steel has memory).

Six-tone chord forming an irregular hexagon (using two equilateral triangles) and showing green, yellow/green, orange, red/orange, violet, blue/violet. These would be great colors to choose for doubleweave, with four colors in the warp and two in the weft.

There's a lot of science involved in how we perceive color and value, obviously. For example, the rods and cones in our eyes allow us to interpret value and color, respectively. Simply put, the rods are more numerous and highly sensitive to light; they work for night vision and peripheral vision. The cones, each devoted to the colors of red, blue, or green, work together to allow our brains to detect the full spectrum. We weave for what we perceive visually in form and color (and substance, which is tactile, but that's another subject).

This is not to say that Itten's chords are hard and fast rules to weave by. (If they were, I would break them a lot.) Instead, I see his theories as objective road maps, a guide when I'm in search of color ideas to achieve interesting color blending for parallel-threaded warps. 

Certainly, I believe that subjective color choices are as important -- perhaps more important, who can say -- for our weaving because, after all, if we don't like the colors we're working with, we probably won't like the end results.

Whatever colors we choose -- objective, subjective, analogous, complementary, harmonious, discordant, even black and white, which aren't colors at all -- it's a joy to learn as much as we can, to sample, to gain insights, to venture outside our comfort zone, and then perhaps to return gladly to our comfort zone, a bit more aware of how best to dwell in it. 

Turquoise. Gets me every time.

Thanks for reading!

 

Not-So-Random Acts of Color: Johannes Itten's Color Chords

 

In 1921, Johannes Itten -- a painter and teacher at Germany's famed Bauhaus School -- published The Color Star, a small book featuring a 12-point color wheel that's been valued by artists ever since. The book included eight templates that one can place over the color star, displaying a variety of what he termed "color chords". Every point on the star represents one color in the spectrum, and every color is shown in a range beginning with the lightest tints (white added) and moving outward to the three darkest shades (black added). 

The pure colors are in the center band of the circle.

Itten's Color Star

Itten's first template shows you the two-tone Dyadic Chords, giving you all of the complementary colors: yellow/violet, yellow-orange/blue-violet, orange/blue, red-orange/blue-green, red/green, and red-violet/yellow-green. 

His Triadic Chords can be created using either isosceles or equilateral triangles, as seen here with the template for an equilateral triangle (and some yarn possibilities).

Without going into more detail, I'll get to the point: I use these chords to choose warp colors for extended-parallel threadings, which use two, or three, or four colors in the warp. The results can create beautiful iridescent shifts in the fabric. Like this sample, using a four-color parallel threading on eight shafts with a turquoise weft.

Or this variation, with a burgundy weft:

Or this, with a violet weft:

For the warp colors, I used the one of the templates for Itten's Quadratic Chord, which can be a square or a rectangle. In this case, I chose the square and based on this I went with saturated colors. Go big and bold or go home, right?

The samples will be used in a workshop I'm presenting at MAFA this June: "Echo and Jin: Playing with Color Chords". My aim is to familiarize weavers with Itten's objective theories about color chords and then let them choose their own colors within that framework.

Everyone's rods and cones are different, we know. Not everybody likes olive in their warp, correct? These subjective decisions are what makes our creations unique.

Here's the warp I'm threading right now, using a Quadratic Color Chord that's a rectangle rather than a square. 

It will be used with a 12-shaft pattern -- and I really love these colors. Consider that you're looking at two sets of complements: blue/orange and green/red (except in this case the red tilts more toward a berry color). 

My next plan is to try a trapezoid as a color chord. Itten doesn't offer that in his templates, but I think it's worth trying. Mother Nature seems to range freely and quite joyously around the spectrum, so why can't we?

This discussion doesn't venture into the importance of value. At this point, without having focused on this topic, my thinking is that it's best to avoid extreme differences in value in a parallel-threaded warp, particularly in a four-end parallel-threaded warp. Some differences in value are OK, but I try to avoid colors like navy, deep purple, forest green, and the like -- or, on the other side of the value scale, yellow, beige, pale pink, baby blue, silver, that range of hues. 

Why? Because the warp color with a very dark value may tamp down the effect of iridescence, while a warp color with a very light value may overwhelm the other colors -- sort of like a singer in a quartet who is louder than anyone else. 

Looking at values, here's what I chose for my first warp (the one I wove on eight shafts, samples shown at the beginning of this post).

The red on the far left is darker in value than I'd like -- and surprisingly, it's darker in value than the blue on the far right -- but I went with it anyway because that's what I had in my stash. (That can overrule a lot of rules.) Still, if you look back at the samples at the top of this post, it seems to work well.

Another question: What do we choose for weft? Sampling is so important for this, of course. Typically, I start any project by winding a warp that is about a yard longer than I need for the finished piece and then I use the first yard or so to experiment with different weft colors.

When I'm weaving Echo or Jin on a four-end parallel, I tend to use muted colors in mid-range values, such as bronze, violet, teal, olive, mustard, terra cotta, even gray. Also, as a rule of thumb, you'll want to use colors that do not appear in the warp -- that is, colors that are found in between the colors you've chosen from the color wheel. 

Then again, for every rule there seems to be an exception, as you see in the fourth photo down from the start of this blog post. For that sample, I used a bright turquoise weft. I love turquoise and find that I often default to that color, for warp or weft.

Itten would say this is a subjective choice, of course. 

Thanks for reading!

Doubleweave on 16 shafts 

using a four-end extended-parallel threading

Why Do We Love Complementary Colors?

Color choices in weaving -- choosing from the untold number of hues in the yarns and dyes available to us -- are among the most valuable decisions we make as weavers. Color can transform a well-known, often repeated weave structure and turn it into something interesting, illuminating, even heartening. 

For an example, take a look at the photo above: It's a simple turned twill on 8 shafts, woven with a hand-painted 5/2 Tencel weft on a hand-pained 60/2 silk  warp. To me, the glow of the yarns, combining an electric blue and a coppery orange, makes for a visually appealing fabric. Nothing fancy going on here, really, just a juxtaposition of complementaries.

It's amazing to me how complementary colors -- those that lie across from each other on the color wheel -- have such immense appeal to our eyes and spirits.

Farbkreis by Johannes Itten, 1961

Nature understands this, of course. 

Leaves of green and magenta

Blues and rose-golds of a sunset

Rose bushes with pink and green

Why are these combinations so beautiful? Science tells us it has to do with the photoreceptor cells in our eyes -- the rods and cones that interpret color for our brains. Rods can detect light and dark, while cones detect colors. And it seems that, if these receptors become overstimulated, they seek to return to normalcy. 

We all know about the after-image effect: When you stare at a bright color for a while and then look away, you will see a ghost image of its complement on the color wheel.

Stare for a few seconds at the green geese on a red background, then look away. 

You will see an after-image of geese in magenta on a blue background.

It's as if our eyes seek balance, as if a marriage of opposites is soothing to our senses. Our eyes look for harmony. At least that's my interpretation. 

So what does this mean for our weaving choices? It all depends, of course, on which technique we are using, what effects we seek and what color combinations we ourselves enjoy, as everyone's rods and cones are different. 

But if I can speak for one technique -- that of choosing warp colors for Echo threadings, where you're threading your loom in two or more alternating colors -- I've come to the conclusion that complementary colors in a warp can produce unexpected and beautiful results in the fabric. It depends greatly on the weft, of course, as it so often does. Here are a few examples, from workshops I've taught.

Most recently, Anne Benson of North Carolina chose these two colors for a workshop I'm teaching, "One Warp, Many Structures: An Exploration of Extended Parallel Threading." 

If you go back to Itten's color wheel, you'll see that these are complementaries: a cherry red and a lime green. And taken at face value, most folks would say that this is an unlikely combination, right? Well, I heartily endorsed her colors for this workshop because I've seen what happens when you start to weave. And here's what happened, using a teal-blue weft.

The fabric now has a softer, more nuanced and very lovely palette, with the chartreuse becoming turquoise and the red becoming magenta. In my view, that's because the teal weft shifts and unites the two complementaries in the warp, serving as a sort of mediator and bringing the opposing colors into harmony, visually speaking. 

Here's another endorsement for using complementary colors in your weaving. In this case, the complements are one of the warp yarns and the weft.

Sample by Sandra Schulz, 4 shafts based on "Blooming Leaf" pattern

Blue and orange working together once again, where a warm red in the warp (what I'm loosely calling orange) works to with the light blue in the weft (which looks almost textured in this photo) to make it seem to pop and glow.

And let me take this one step further, to show you a sample I wove on four shafts using four seemingly discordant colors in the warp.

This is a 4-end parallel threading on 4 shafts.

Here, the four colors in the warp are red, orange, chartreuse and turquoise: two sets of complementary colors (red/chartreuse and turquoise/orange). I'm guessing the weft is a bronze color, which is again a sort of "mediator" among the four, in a medium value and a fairly unsaturated hue.

I don't always practice what I preach, however, which is urging weavers to choose colors out of their comfort zone, understanding that the weft can make such a difference. What happens when I don't follow my own advice?

A fabric like this, which has an attractive pattern (in Echo on 16 shafts) -- but one that is hard to see because the colors are too close in hue and value. The warp colors are royal blue and aqua and the weft is black, if I recall correctly.

Nice, in my opinion, but no cigar

Right now I'm planning an inaugural piece for my new (to me) 32-shaft Megado. I've designed a 32-shaft extended-parallel-threading pattern in two warp colors.

Detail of 32-shaft pattern in Jin

You can't tell, but the warp colors in this drawdown are royal blue and aqua -- the same colors I used for the not-as-successful piece in the prior photo. The weft is a red/orange color, a complement to the warp colors, which makes it work. 

I originally planned to go with these two colors for my warp.

These are what you call "analogous colors," meaning that they are near each other on the color wheel. And yes, they will work for an Echo design -- but I'm thinking that, based on my recent experience, they won't create an exciting design, even when woven with a complementary color in the warp. It's a safe choice, you might say.

So I decided to take my own advice and make my warp-color choices by thinking out of the crayon box. And here's what I'm using.

Colors of a sunset, way out of my comfort zone...

I will keep you apprised, hopefully in my next blog post. Thanks for reading!