We spoke about the color wheel in our previous post. A great example to use is Kona Cotton’s Color of the Year. It’s a beautiful green color called Enchanted. In this blog post, we’re going to use Kona’s Enchanted as the base color (Hue) and show you how to take that Hue (or any hue) and choose additional color values, shapes, and scale that will tie them all together. Following these basic principles, you will be able to put your prints & solids together for quilts, home decor, and even apparel. 

VALUE

Value relates to the lightness or darkness of a color. Gradations of value will create depth in a design. Our Base Color (Hue) Kona in Enchanted, starts us out, and then we can mix darker and lighter green fabrics chosen to build variation and depth. The image below displays, green Enchanted mixed with darker and lighter shades. Looking at the color wheel we observe the jade and green color are next to each other. Utilizing colors next to each other within the Color Wheel creates an Analogous Color Plan.

SHAPES

Shapes and tints reduce flatness. Here Emily Taylor’s Salt Wind collection Broken Pieces adds a nice contrast with the larger irregular rectangle shapes and then Art Gallery’s Irregularity Jade offering a smaller irregular shape to the mix.

SCALE

Smaller prints add less contrast while adding larger sizes of prints will create increasing contrast with solids.

The white fabric has been added to break up the greens & then for a little more deviation and to add some more visual interest a navy blue print has been added to the mix. Navy in the design plays a role in adding variation and another dimension to the overall design.

Excerpted from Fabric.com’s blog post by Windy at the Weekend Quilter All fabrics can be found at Fabric.com