Ways to explore color in wet felting

While some people are great with this – either because they have an intuition for color or because they’ve studied art – many of us find it difficult to combine colors to get the harmonious results we want. Even if you’re a natural at this, I’ve personally found that it’s something you can always improve on.

To help you create palettes that convey what you want for your pieces, as well as to give you ideas of how you can mix wool to attain a particular shade, I’m creating a short series on this topic. For that, we need to start at the beginning, with the color wheel.

I’m sure you have an understanding of the color wheel. But do you use it when you choose the colors for your projects? And in which ways can you use it to create color palettes or to convey particular feelings? This is an excellent tool to help you with your decisions if you know how to take advantage of it.

The color wheel is a color circle created to illustrate the relationship between primary, secondary and tertiary colors.

The primary colors are red, blue, and yellow.

You get the secondary colors (orange, green, and violet) by mixing the primary colors with each other.

And you get the tertiary colors (yellow/orange, red/orange, red/violet, blue/violet, blue/green, yellow/green) by mixing the primary and the secondary colors with each other.

A great way to immediately use the color wheel without having to elaborate too much on any combination and to always get it right, is to opt for:

• Monochromatic color schemes
• Warm or cold color schemes

You get a monochromatic color scheme by adding white or black to any color of the wheel.

A piece felted in monochromatic colors will give you a sense of calm, elegance, and harmony, as you can see from the bag below.

You get a warm or cold color scheme by dividing the color wheel in two and choosing colors from one of the sides.

Warm colors convey a sense of energy, positivity, and happiness, while cool colors are soothing and calming. Here are a couple of very simple examples that I created by choosing two colors from each side of the wheel. Notice what each of them makes you feel.

Next week we’ll go on with this topic, and we’ll get into more complex ideas. I hope this was useful for you and I was able to show you how easy this can be if you understand the concepts behind using the color wheel.