Exploring Ombres & the Variances of Color

Lime Mojito by The Painted Tiger - Click for Image Source

Ombre, if you're in the fashion and style industry you see this a lot as it becomes popular, fades a bit, then comes back (yes that was a color pun).  But that's not me, I'm a yarnie so terms of fashion only become relevant to me when the involve my love of fibers...

Ombre is a term that many times gets applied to types of yarn, those that may be variegated with all of the colors being of a similar hue and merely differing in shade.  But perhaps I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.  These are all artistic terms that refer to color so let's start there...

Not the greatest picture...but an accidental ombre I created when bleaching my hair - golden yellow to red to dark brown to black at the very tips

While I'm sure before I could recognize ombre if I saw it, if you asked me to describe it to you I certainly wouldn't have been able to give you a clear answer, gotta love context.  So first off I looked it up this morning because I've been thinking about a pair of house slippers that I think would be simply fabulous in an ombre gray.

Merriam Webster defines an ombre as such:

having colors or tones that shade into each other - used especially of fabrics in which the color is graduated from light to dark.

An example of an ombre green made from scrap yarn

Now a brief foray into language for a moment, notice that it's an adjective, so it's being used to describe the quality of something, rather than being something in its own right.  Perhaps even more interesting, which made perfect sense to me being a language geek, that the modern use is French in origin, the verb ombrer means to shade, and of course that comes from the Latin umbra which means shadow.  So while the word sounds a little funny to the ear you can see where it came from.  An aside, this led to me starting to read about shadows in a scientific sense this morning which was also fascinating as an artist.

Meandering back to the point.  Hue essentially is color, the world of science defines it based on light reflected and references that a hue is in lay terms a basic color - like blue, red, green, etc.  Light blue, medium blue, and dark blue would all be of the same hue - eg blue.  Then there are shades - made with the addition of black and tints - made with the addition of white.  But that gets into an artistic defining of hue.  For the artistic a hue is still a color, but one that neither involves a shade or tint.

So in considering creating an ombre pattern within a project you would want to stay within the same hue, and use varying shades.  I do suppose you could use varying tints as well but the whole effect is by using varying degrees of darkness (or lightness) of the same color.  Then all of this had me thinking way back to a painting I did in high school (unfortunately long since destroyed) wherein we did a gridded drawing, painted with acrylics on a large bit of panel canvas in four different styles - true color (to the picture), warm colors, cool colors, and a monochromatic one of any color.  I chose blue and while it's been forever since I did it I can still rather clearly see the varying tints and shades of blue.  A monochromatic pattern mimics the ombre affect to a point.

Colors & Emotions - Click Image for Source Credit

Funny how something so simple seeming as color has so much life and variance to it.  Then again color is so integral in our lives in so many other ways.  We use color to describe how we are feeling - red with anger, green with envy, blue when we're sad.  Color can play a major importance in our health, certainly that cold that has you coughing up yellow-white ick isn't as alarming as if it were green, black, or red.  Then there's the proverbial traffic light where red causes us to halt, and green sends us off again with yellowing doing a big of encouraging and discouraging.

They bring us other feelings too, some psychological others less so.  For instance a small room painted a dark color only appears smaller than were it painted a lighter color.  We have colors we are familiar with around certain holidays which help bring those feelings to mind - the red, green, silver, gold, and white of Christmas reminds us of the snow, bells, tinsel, trees, and bright decorations.  Whereas the red, pink, and white of Valentine's Day has us thinking amorous (or anti-amorous) thoughts.

What colors do you see? Click Image for Source Credit

Color is by no means created equal either.  We all vary slightly in our reaction to colors, though within our individual cultures there are trends in feeling.  (Imagine that a trend in feeling, but trust me there's no doubt, just pay attention and you'll see it.)  What one may call magenta another insists is fuschia.  Still another says it's just pink.  Scientifically speaking where it falls on the light spectrum is what it is, but how we interpret and describe the color and then how we react to it can be entirely different.  Blood red has a bit of a sinister feel to it - but cherry & fire engine red not so much.  But are they so far off from blood red?  Or the bright red of arterial (and highly oxygenated blood) not really.  But they certainly don't inspire the same shudder in some people.

Then there is the tradition within culture, in some such as Chinese, white is associated with death and mourning.  In others its associated with purity and innocence.  Red-haired people in several cultures were regarded as evil - then again it wasn't genetically the norm to see children with that hair color so they were regarded entirely differently.

A scrap project made of leftovers of yarn isn't so attractive when the colors are all over the place

In my work, as with any visually-oriented artist, color is very important.  The same garment in a solid color may seem flat and boring, giving it several colors or a progressing pattern of colors can breathe life into a piece.  The "wrong" colors can bring down even the most beautiful design to some less than appealing to look at.  In the healing & spiritual work I do color's importance takes on and whole other importance.  It can be used to heal us and affect us psychologically.  Colors relate, very similarly to the rainbow, to the chakras and certain colors when seen in the aura can hold meanings.  Healing light is often seen as white, pink, or violet.

In the comments below I'd love to hear about your experience with color!  Do you ever notice how it makes you feel?  Do you find yourself gravitating towards certain colors and shying away from some others?  Have you ever seen something you loved but didn't buy because you hated the color?  If you're new to my blog make sure you join the newsletter and check me out on social media so we can connect!