Color Wheel, Family Tree

Did you know that colors have families?

Deb Menz says, “The more you know about colors, the fewer surprises there are when working with them.” Her new videos, Color Magic: Color Families and Color Magic: Value & Harmony are a "get to know you" for colors and hue families.  

Color Magic: Color Families takes you on a tour of the color wheel, getting you acquainted with the basic groups that different hues fall into. When you think of “a color,” what you’re probably thinking of is a hue: red, green, yellow. There’s a surprising richness to these basics—it’s more than just the colors you learned in elementary school. Did you know that there are cool reds and warm blues? That a little blue cools a red, but a little yellow warms a blue?

Color Magic: Value & Harmony is all about how those individual colors play together. Just like musical notes, colors are perceived in relation to one another, with major and minor keys to set the tone. And it’s not just the hues on the color wheel that determine how colors play together; black, white, and gray have their own roles to play in value and contrast.

Deb says, “These videos are a way to walk through what the colors/hue families are, how they relate to each other, and why they react together the way they do in handspun yarns.”

The language we use to talk about colors—value, saturation, warm, harmony, contrast—is all emotional, isn’t it? And color certainly creates an emotional response in all of us, whether it’s soothing or jarring or irresistibly exciting. And when you understand more about color, you’ll feel better about using it to make spectacular yarns.