Script for

Episode 131:

Learning to See Hue

What's the difference between "blue" and "blue-green"?

Hello there, darling Sheepspotter! Welcome to Episode 131 of The Sheepspot Podcast. I'm Sasha, and my job is to help you make more yarns you love. In today's episode, I want to share three exercises that will help you learn about hue and get really comfortable with the color wheel. 

A couple of episodes ago I shared how useful working with the color wheel has been for me as I've learned about how to combine colors and work with color in my handspun yarns. Not only did the color wheel help me understand the relationships between different hues, it also gave me a set of categories into which to slot different colors I encountered in the world.

Before I get into the exercises I want to say a little about the kind of color wheel I use and how I'm using the words "color" and "hue" in this episode.

If you google color wheel, you'll find lots of different versions of them with different numbers of colors represented. The color wheel I use has twelve hues: the primaries of magenta, cyan, and yellow (which correspond to the red, blue, and yellow we all learned about in elementary school); the secondaries, that one gets by mixing two primaries, so these are green, orange, and violet; and my particular favorites, the tertiary hues, which are mixes of  primaries and secondaries. So the typical artist's color wheel that you might pick up at an art store will have, in order, red, red-orange, orange, yellow orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, blue-violet, violet, and red-violet. Those are what I'm calling "hues." Think of hues as addresses on the color wheel. Now, within each of those addresses there are lots of colors. There's the hue blue, and there are colors like  royal blue, navy blue (blue mixed with black), sky blue (blue mixed with white) and all the other colors we can produce by adding black, white, or gray to blue. There are also all the de-saturated, duller blues (I'll put some images of desaturated blues from Benjamin Moore in the show notes to this episode).

But where exactly is the line between blue and blue-green, on one hand, and blue and blue-violet on the other? It's really in the eye of the beholder. If you go to the Benjamin Moore website and look at the 409 colors they classify as "blue," you'll find that for Benjamin Moore the category of blue includes many colors I would call "blue-green" and just a few that I would call "blue-violet." Benjamin Moore classifies most of the blue-violets  it makes in the purple section.

But if you want to really get the most from a color wheel, and if you really want to be able to describe color, you need to learn to see the subtle differences between, say, blue and blue violet. I've got three exercises to help you learn to see hue.

Blending a color wheel

The first exercise is to get some fiber dyed in magenta, cyan, and yellow, and blend yourself a color wheel using hand-cards or hand combs. Use hand tools, if you can, not a drum carder, because this exercise is all about figuring out where the lines are between the hues, so do your mixing slowly and incrementally. It's a great way to get a hands-on feel for the different hues.

Dyeing a color wheel

You can also do this with dye. Again, you'll need some magenta, cyan, and yellow dye; you can use food coloring for a quick and food-safe way to do this experiment. Using small amounts of dye, mix the hues. So you might start with a drop of cyan and a drop of yellow for green, then two drops of cyan and one of yellow for blue-green, and two drops of yellow and one of cyan for yellow-green. You can test your formulas on coffee filters if you don't want to do any actual dyeing. You may be surprised by what you find. Some colors are stronger in mixtures than others, so your 50%/50% mixture may actually yield a yellow- green or or blue-green.

Classifying the colors you see around you

Once you've either blended or dyed a color wheel, you can continue to practice seeing hue out in the world. Eventually you'll be able to figure out the hue of even very desaturated, complex colors, like Benjamin Moore's "Heirloom Quilt." Is it a red, a red-orange, or a red-violet? How about "Tawny Port"? I'm going to put pictures of both of them in the show notes, and I'd love to know what you think.

There's a dedicated discussion thread in The Flock where you can comment on this episode and discuss it with me and other listeners. The link is in the show notes for this episode, which you'll find right inside your podcast app. So just open up the description for this episode, click the link, and you'll be taken right to the thread.

If you haven't joined The Flock, Sheepspot's free online community for inquisitive handspinners, you should! You'll get access to all of the freebies I've created for the podcast, as well as several self-guided spinning challenges, our weekly spinning check-ins every Friday, and lots more. Join us at theflock.sheepspot.com.

Darling Sheepspotter, that's it for me this week. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back next week with some tips on working with value. You don't want to miss it. Until then, spin something! I promise it will do you good.