J.J. Ruggers Colour Workshop

 J.J. Ruggers, the Paris rug hooking guild that I belong to, meets 10 months of the year on a Saturday. Sometimes we just get together for the day and hook and other times we have events or workshops. This month, Pat Lawson, one of our members, gave a presentation on Colour Theory. Pat's career was in the lighting industry so understanding colour and how we see colour came naturally out of her work life and into her hooking life. Back when we were all just starting to hook she was using colour language that I am, now, just beginning to understand. 

Prior to the workshop Pat sent out an e-mail with a link to some colour acuity tests as all of us see colour differently. The link was to colorlitelens.com, a website that is selling glasses but has some interesting online tests. Doing those tests confirmed my green/blue colour blindness and  measured the effectiveness of the blue and green cones in my retina.

Pat doesn't do anything by half, she came loaded with a slide show, resources and tons of information.

 Without getting too "sciency" we learned how the eye works and how colour is perceived.

We are all familiar with the traditional colour wheel (I have just finished hooking one) with Red, Blue and Yellow as the primary colours, Green, Orange and Purple are secondary, and so on. Pat introduced us to the other colour wheels that have been formulated and discussed which are more useful for our work.

Although she was sticking to colour theory, every now and then we did veer off into how these principles impacted our struggles with colour in our rugs.

To finish off, Pat handed out some coloured papers and we played with some effects and phenomena.

For our first exercise we cut and positioned our papers like this, stared at the orange line for 15 seconds and then gradually dragged the red paper to the left. Miraculously a line of red appeared on the right hand side of the orange and it bled to the left as the red paper moved away. Freaky!

Then we created the impression of transparency by placement of coloured papers.

Finally we cut a strip of red in half and laid it on 2 different colours to see how the colour around it impacts our perception of a colour.

More colours between, fools the eye even more.

After our end of year pot luck lunch, Pam Watkins gave a presentation on colours as they relate to fashion. Pam used to "do" peoples colours, designating them Spring, Summer, Winter or Fall and this would help determine which colours look best on them. I seem to remember, Pam doing this for our little Monday Night hooking group and I was a Winter.

That was our Colourful end of year meeting. The group will continue to meet in a park in Paris but I will probably not attend again until September.