Saturday, February 7, 2015

Studying Saturation - tints

In our study subgroup of my guild, "Centered on Color & Fiber", this year we are focusing on two qualities of color, saturation and value.  For my exercise in saturation (aka intensity of a color), I have been playing with different ways to desaturate a color, or give it less intensity, when dyeing yarn.

One way is by adding white to the color, or in the case of dyeing, using less dye on white yarn.  Adding white to a color doesn't change its hue, it just makes its value lighter; these lighter colors are called tints of a color.

As I'd remembered from previous dyeing sessions, when you reduce the amount of dye in a linear manner, the darker more saturated colors in a series like this look closer in tonal value to each other than the lighter more pastel tints.



Here's a grayscale version of the same photo; some of the darker colors are hard to tell apart.

The darkest ball of yarn is dyed at a depth of shade (DOS) of 1.0.  This means that for every gram of fiber (yarn), I used 1 ml of a 1% dye solution.  You can use more dye and get even more saturated color, I guess until all the places on the fiber that can accept the dye are taken.  I didn't push that limit.  I'm just defining the DOS 1.0 color as my most saturated blue for this project.

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