Color Chart

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with color. I finally remembered the ridiculously expensive pack of Color-aid paper that I had left over from my college classes. It has a huge range of colors — 312 in all. I thought it would work great to make my own color wheel but when I started arraying the color gradations, I decided to make my own gradation reference chart instead.

Surprisingly, there were quite a few blanks so DH & I ran over to Home Depot to try to fill in some of the blanks. The task was complicated because the paper has a matte finish but the paint swatches have a slightly glossy finish. When photographed, the glossy finish appears lighter that they do in real life, so there are places in the photograph where it looks like colors are reversed. Plus, many of the missing colors were in the very dark range and there just aren’t that many paint colors to choose from in the dark tones. Maybe I’ll need to look at a couple more paint stores to see if I can find better colors for certain spots.

It was interesting to note that for darker colors like violet and some of the other cool colors, there was a wider range of tints. For warm colors, especially yellow, there was a wider range of shades. Thinking about it, it made sense since violet is naturally dark and yellow is naturally light.

In any case, it was fun to play with the little 2-inch squares. I decided to leave a narrow line on both sides of the pure colors so it would be easy to tell where the tints and shadows began. As I cut and glued, I tried to think of ways to use the chart for comparision purposes when working with fabric and specific color schemes. If nothing else, it will be pretty to look at!