Tuesday 8 May 2012

Colour My World Cyan

CMYK color diagram, description follows
CMYK Colour Wheel from www.tomjewett.com
One of the reasons I picked Cyan as a challenge colour is because I really don't know what to do with it in my quilts, or even in my stash. It never seems to look right with my blues or my greens so it doesn't get used. I'd like to change that because I do love teal and I really admire the quilts I've been seeing the last couple of years that have cyan, red and grey as the palette.

It actually wasn't easy to find out more about cyan, even though it's s one of the primary colours on the CMYK colour wheel. According to Wikipedia, "cyan is used to refer to the color obtained by mixing equal amounts of green and blue light or the removal of red from white light." 

From 123rf.com
Light. Aqua, turquoise, teal, robin's egg blue, mint, cerulean, celeste, Tiffany blue all fall into the cyan colour scale.

Cyan is the basis of some rather sinister words - cyanide and cyanosis (blue skin). That said, people often put cyan coloured tiles or linings in their pools so their water looks more inviting and clean. And did you know that Uranus is coloured cyan because of the vast amount of methane gas in its atmosphere?



That's all I've got for cyan, but I hope it's enough to get you thinking about what you might do with it for this month's Colour My World challenge


So far, I'm thinking of something very clean and graphic, like a shadow play using cyan and teal. I took some pictures of Micah's shadow on a swing the other day. It any of those turn out, I may try doing his shadow in teal on a cyan background. I also have a couple of other ideas, but I'm leaning towards the shadow play idea.


Have a great one!

4 comments:

  1. Go look at what Mary did with it at http://hillcountryquilter-mary.blogspot.com/
    I just read here post about strips that sizzle and she used the teal mixed with the purple range. It looks great.

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  2. Well I feel like I've just learned a lot!! Thank you :)
    I absolutely adore the idea of the shadow play, it would look incredible!

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  3. Thanks so much for the Cyan lesson....nice to know this as it's one of my favorite range of colors...or can I call it a range? I just know that I like aqua, turquoise, teal etc!

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  4. Thanks for the info... I was waiting for this post before choosing my fabrics, guess I know what I will be doing this morning! The shadow play idea sounds like fun!

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