A colour does not look the same everywhere. Put it beside red, and it looks one way. Put it beside blue, and it looks another. The cloth has not changed. The eye has.
Simultaneous contrast
The name for this is simultaneous contrast. It means a colour looks different because of the colours around it at the same time (Wikipedia: Michel Eugène Chevreul).
Chevreul
Michel Eugène Chevreul was a French chemist. In 1824 he became head of the dye works at the Gobelins Manufactory in Paris, after complaints about its dyes. He found that a black the makers had been blamed for was good. The cloth looked weak and reddish when it sat among deep blues and purples. He named the effect simultaneous contrast (Wikipedia: Michel Eugène Chevreul).
The same page defines it as “the tendency for a color to appear to shift toward the complementary of its neighbor, both in terms of hue and darkness.” A complementary colour is the one opposite on the colour wheel. We explain the wheel in warm, cool and the rainbow.
Albers
Josef Albers was an artist and teacher. In 1963 he published Interaction of Color, a record of an “experiential way of studying and teaching color”. He wrote that colour “is almost never seen as it really is” (Wikipedia: Josef Albers). He taught by experiment, not by rule. Cloth suits that way of learning.
See it in the studio
Chess is the studio’s light-against-dark pattern. Its own words are “Every seam earns its keep, light against dark.” The studio tries to set each cloth among neighbours of the opposite lightness.
- Open the studio. A Sample box of ten real cloths is ready.
- Press Chess.
- Pick one cloth and find it more than once. The Sample box holds 7 pieces of each cloth, so most cloths appear several times.
- Look at it beside its different neighbours. Does it look the same each time?
- Press Chess again. The studio gives a new arrangement. Find the same cloth in its new place.
We cannot promise that every arrangement shows a strong effect. It depends on the cloth. Try more than one.
Try it by hand
Cut two small squares of one scrap. An adult does the cutting. Lay one on a red cloth and one on a blue cloth. Look at the two squares together. Ask the children what they see.
What it teaches
- A colour belongs to its surroundings as well as to itself.
- Choosing cloth for a panel is choosing neighbours.
- A photo in the studio shows each cloth by itself. The panel shows them together. The two can look different, and that is the lesson.
Next steps
- Light and dark in a pattern
- A favourite colours panel
- 11 Kantha patterns for 35 squares of cloth