Colour theory for the fearful

Lyn

Apart from knowing that blue and yellow can make green, the official world of colour theory is a foreign land to me as I tend to just go with my gut, but I'd love to find out more about it all, so I'm taking part in a Colour Challenge by The Felting and Fiber Forum.  The first part is to make a colour wheel using any medium e.g. paint, dye, coloured pencils, whatever you have to hand.

Given that I've got a huge stash of fluffy stuff - here's my first study: a basic colour wheel made from fibres.  All of the colours in this wheel are made from just red, yellow and blue merino wool fibres carded together in different amounts.

You may well know all of this already but red, yellow and blue are called 'primary colours' because they can't be made by combining any other colors, but they can be blended together to make other colours.

So to make the colour wheel I took some bright dyed merino wool tops in the primary colours...

 ...and picked up my hand carders.  I carded together equal amounts of red and yellow to make orange; equal amounts of yellow and blue to make green and equal amounts of blue and red to make purple.

Orange, green and purple are called 'secondary colours'.

If you blend a 'secondary colour' with a 'primary colour' you'll get a 'tertiary colour' that has a double-barrelled name, such as 'blue-green'.

Well, that's as far as I've got and I'm eager to play some more!

If you'd like to mix unique colours to use in your felting, grab some hand carders and give it a go with our free tutorial how to use hand carders.

You can add in silk, angelina fibres and other bits n bobs to snazzy up your carded merino! 

Have a play :)