Light, Medium and Dark

Today I spent time selecting fabrics for my first series of exercises for Katie Pasquini Masopust’s “Jumpstarting Creativity” class. Picking fabrics for a project is usually a meditative one, but that didn’t happen today. It was actually a bit tough. I only have access to a small portion of my stash at the moment and that challenged me to find true light, medium and dark fabrics in two color ways that had to be complements to the other. I only had to find six fabrics. That’s it.

It took me 35 minutes.

Part of the problem is that I am determined to work with red and green. I love green and am very comfortable working with it, but that’s not necessarily the case with red. The second part of the problem was that I had fabric I wanted to work with, that I was sure would be suitable, only to discover they didn’t fit. I realize that my current stash is mostly lights and darks. At least, in reds and greens.

Thankfully, I managed to find the one medium value green to finish the set. I’m actually rather impressed with how close in value each of the different fabrics is to its complementary partner. I wouldn’t have selected this collection of fabrics as light, medium and dark without the aid of my greyscale. See what I mean?

All the shades in their full-hued glory.

The same fabrics, in greyscale. Rather amazing, don’t you think?