Some of you have been asking what I’ve been doing with the blends I mixed for the tide pool pieces I’ll be making. I’m still just experimenting. I started by making a few tiny canes from some of the blends; most of the canes are less than 1/4″ across after they have been reduced. I sliced off a bunch of 3/64 inch-thick slices using my slicer and started combining them on my work surface to create a design somewhat evocative of a tide pool. I immediately discovered that the blends I had made were too much alike in saturation and value to produce a clearly readable image. As a reminder, these were the blends
Tide pool color palette. Carol Simmons
and these were my inspiration pictures.
(Note: It is a bit difficult to make the following comparison on the computer. Try squinting your eyes to blur the images.)
I realized that by reducing the canes to a very small size I essentially “averaged out” the light and dark ends of the blends visually. When the canes were combined they looked more like the textile image on the left, above in which everything is similar in value, than the one on the right as I had intended. I needed to make the light ends lighter and brighter and the dark ends a bit more saturated (purer in color). Stated another way the gradients needed to be more extreme.
Towards this end I modified most of the remaining blends to enhance the gradients and made a few brighter ones to pick up the highlights in the yarn image. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of the new set of blends. I kept the first canes since there wasn’t anything wrong with them individually, the problem was with the collection as a whole.
Right now I’m simply playing with the cane slices to see how they might go together before I begin creating the actual design. There is no overall plan to the image below, but I can see that I still need more lights.
