Lighting, Shading and Color Placement

I shared in past posts how I picked my color palettes for each quilt. I get asked about that often, and it’s fun to share my inspiration boards.

Color placement is another part of color that I don't talk about much. Why do I put the colors where I do within each quilt?

It’s all about lighting! I use a lot of inspiration pics from nature to solidify my color choices, but I also try to mimic the way sunlight plays into these natural landscapes to capture some of their essence.

The way sunlight streams through the trees creates a bright spot in the leafy canopy…. This was the inspiration for using an ombre fabric as my background in my latest pattern, Fall Foliage.

I figured if I could create a light spot in the background, as the leaves tumbled down, I could capture that warm fall afternoon sunlight vibe.

Here you see my lighting inspiration pics for my Entangled Sky pattern. I used these same pics as my color inspiration, but it's the way light is used that makes the three-dimensional structure pop.

Imagine the light source coming from one direction, as in a sunset, making it easier to narrow down color placement to get a dynamic effect.

When picking fabrics, this idea helped me pick a definite light, medium, and dark shade in each color. Once I had built the blocks, it was the inspiration pics that helped me decide how to layer the colors. I was going for a latticework of clouds over a fading blue sky kind of look.

Happy Sunday everyone,

Krista

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