Color Play

I've spent the last few days playing with color.  There have been several reasons for this.

First of all, I have been working with the items of clothing in my wardrobe, and putting things together both in old familiar ways and in new ways.  As I've do so I have occasionally wondered to myself why certain color combinations do or don't work for me; not just in terms of what colors I wear well, but in terms of what I feel comfortable wearing. It is not the kind of thing I am used to spending time thinking about, but I am finding it relevant now, in this time, when I am rediscovering so many things that I have put aside for a while.    

While I was doing this several posted about using the colors in their eyes as a guide to the colors to wear.  Always one to try some new thing, I played around with that for a while, coming up with several different versions of eye palettes.  Here is one of them.

My first thought was that I don't actually wear a lot of those colors.  Should I?  No, I decided not.  Then I thought I would look into it further and started playing with the colors and eye palettes and translating colors from one color system (RGB, CMYK, HTML codes, Pantone codes) so that I could visualize these colors in the pantone fabric system that I am used to working with. 

Around about this same time, Myrna posted on her blog about the colors she wears, the colors she defines as her colors, and the ones she does not wear.  This got me thinking because I would generally say that I wear most colors, or at least a couple of colors or shades from each segment of the color wheel. As a result I started looking in my closet and my fabric collection and thinking about what I wear and why I wear it.  

I have basically a cool skin tone, and medium-dark ash-brown hair.  My eyes are green. Long ago, I had my colors done a few times, but the definitive analysis was by Donna Fujii who basically said that I am a High Contrast Summer. 

Actually this worked pretty well for me.  The sample swatches Donna gave me included most of the colors I wear the most often and her analysis was pleasing.  That doesn't mean that I only wear the colors she gave me, but they gave me a foundation around which to play. 

But wait.  The colors Donna gave me include a few things that are not in the High-Contrast Summer palette, at least as defined in her books, and they left a few things out as well.  Here are the cards from my palette, disassembled and piled up on my cutting table this morning.

See those olive greens, and warmer browns and caramel colors?  Those are part of my palette too.  Where did they come from?  Look at my eyes.  Some of those colors are in my eyes.  But what are those eye colors?  Those bright "olive" colors are actually grayed shades of yellow.  Some of the greens in my eyes are yellows and yellow greens, some are blue greens, most of them are grayed shades. I do wear these colors, some of the colors in my eyes, but not a great deal, not usually alone.  I wear them with other colors, often complementary colors.  I often wear colors that are complementary to the colors in my eyes, medium-toned muted or grayed shades  of blue-violet, blue-red, magenta, and purple. These all go well with my skin tones and complement my eyes. The bright brights and the dark darks are not for me.  

When I wear analogous colors they tend to be more in the red to blue-violet range than in any other shade, but I will sometimes wear a range of greens as well. 

I primarily tend to be attracted to complementary colors, and to split-complementary groupings, as well as triadic combinations.  These are my loves, color-wise, and they allow me to play with a lot of color, even if I stick primarily to the muted, deep, and grayed shades, which is my wont.  As I look at these things they fit, the cool blue-pink skin with violet undertones and sallow overtones goes with my cool ash-brown hair and my eyes which are a mix of grayed yellow and blue greens.  

I don't actually know where I am going with all of this, perhaps nowhere, but it is helping me to articulate the way I put things together, and also to better understand why some things "work" better than others.  I've never really studied color, never thought about it, just kind of threw it together.

I'm finding it rather interesting.