Guest Post!
Hi, I’m Alisa! By day I run Jellyfish & Stone, and by night (ok, afternoon, let’s be honest) I’m Bobbie’s trusty assistant. I’m an artist and have mainly worked in watercolors and acrylics, and I recently started teaching myself to paint digitally. Bobbie asked me to write this guest post on transparency because she suspects I know a thing or two about colors. She’s right, as usual! If you’ve ever tried painting, you may know it’s quite difficult to get your paint to actually be opaque, aka a solid color with nothing showing through. Most (watercolor and acrylic) paints are inherently transparent, and become more so when you add water. That means you can layer them on top of each other to create different colors.
Notice how the colors change where the circles overlap
As a quilter you may not give much time to thinking about transparency. After all, most of the fabrics used for quilting are opaque! Piece ’em together and off you go. I’m going to offer you a really good reason to think about transparency in your quilts!
What’s Transparency?
First, let’s get clear on what I mean by “transparency.”
Most of The Geeky Bobbin’s quilt patterns have been opaque, meaning they have the appearance of distinct areas of color adjacent to other areas of color, happily hanging out without mixing.
When you think about transparent fabrics in real life, you might think of gauzy, see-through fabrics like organza, or tulle, even nylons! (Does anyone still wear those?!)
Unless you’re getting very experimental, you’re not likely to quilt with those sheer fabrics. But you can choose fabric colors and patterns to create the illusion of transparency in your quilt tops!
Why transparency?
Playing with the illusion of transparency in your quilts is another way to add a sense of depth to your quilt. It lends itself well to modern designs, and even introduces an element of modernity into more traditional quilt designs.
If you’ve been wanting to trying something different and exciting in your quilts, transparency might be for you!
Choosing fabrics for transparent effects
To create the illusion of transparency, you need a few things:
- Fabrics within the same color family (all blues, greens, oranges, etc.)
- Fabrics within the same color family that have varying values (that’s a fancy way to say lighter and darker. E.g., light blue, medium blue, dark blue, etc.)
- Fabrics within the same color family with different patterns (stripes, polka dots, etc.)
- The ability to identify which fabrics are lighter or darker than each other. This may seem like a silly thing to include, because obviously light blue is lighter than dark blue, but sometimes it can be tricky, especially with patterned fabrics. Most of the time you’ll be able to figure this out. For when you just can’t decide, here are two tricks you can use:
☆ Trick One (the old fashioned way): lay your fabrics out side-by-side; stand back and squint your eyes until everything is blurry. That blurriness will make it easier to identify which colors are lighter and darker, or which are similar.
☆ Trick Two (the modern way): lay your fabrics out side-by-side; take a picture with your phone. Edit the picture to remove all color, so it becomes grayscale. This will also make it easier to identify which colors are lighter and darker, and which ones have a similar value.
Bobbie experimented with using transparency in her quilt pattern, I Wove U. The hearts can be made opaque, BUT! by using a third fabric where the shapes overlap, she created the illusion of transparency. Bam! A whole new effect is created! (The instructions for both block variations are in the I Wove U pattern, but Bobbie jokingly calls this fat-quarter friendly three-color version “I Wove U Plaidly”.)
In this throw sized quilt top of I Wove U “Plaidly”, you can see how the transparency adds an element of modernity to the classic pattern with sashing and cornerstones.
Let’s check out some of the different effects you can make.
Subtractive Mixing
If you’ve tried to mix paint before, you may know that mixing two colors together makes a third color. E.g. mixing blue and yellow paint makes green. You may also remember mixing paint (excluding white) usually gets you darker colors. And if you mixed all three primary colors together you get “black” (really, it’s a muddy brown). This is called “subtractive mixing” and happens because the pigment in paint absorbs certain waves of light while reflecting others to your eyes. You can create a similar effect using fabrics.
Notice how the overlapping parts of the hearts in this mockup of I Wove U “Plaidly” are darker than the rest of the hearts.
Additive Mixing
But there’s another, equally cool way to mix colors and that’s with light! You’re reading this on a screen right now, and that screen is composed of pixels. Do you recall that pixels display RGB (red-green-blue)? Or going waaaaaay back in time, maybe you had a chance to play with an old-school projector and experimented with color filters?
In this example from Wikipedia, the rectangles of red light and green light overlap to make an area of yellow light, and that area is brighter than the individual lights.
When you mix two beams of light (in a dark room, of course), they produce a brighter color. If you mixed red + green + blue light equally, you get white light. This is called “additive mixing” and happens when light doesn’t get absorbed by other substances (as it does in paint), it just bounces right into our retinas and mixes there.
Do you see how the overlapping parts of the hearts in this I Wove U “Plaidly” mockup are brighter than their original colors? Combine that with the black background and you have the effect of a glowing screen!
Average Mixing
This last one isn’t exactly a type of transparency. It’s what you get when you blend colors without transparency.
Imagine a bucket of yellow golf balls, and a bucket of orange golf balls. If you mix the two buckets together, the pigments in the balls don’t overlap to absorb more light, and the light shining on them doesn’t overlap. Your eye sees both yellow and orange. If you squint, your eyes will see the average of the two colors of golf balls — neither darker as in subtractive mixing, nor brighter as in additive mixing. The result is the average of the two brightnesses, and the average hue — an orangey-yellow.
For quilt fabrics, this can mean a medium red plus a medium blue overlap as a medium purple. Or they could overlap as red polka dots on a blue background. Or a red and blue stripe.
The eye still sees a semi-transparency effect where the hearts overlap, even though it’s more like looking through a colander or window blinds.
I hope you’re excited about the effects you can create with this surprisingly simple, big-blocked, delicious quilt pattern!
Want to make your own I Wove U quilt? Get a copy of the pattern!
