Value is the lightness or darkness of a hue. Value is essential to create enough contrast to recognize the design in your block and quilt. Without value contrast, your quilt blocks simply blend into one another without any recognizable design.
Value is not a color or a hue. It is how light or dark that hue is. And what is that thing in the photo above? That is my value scale for painting. It starts from white and goes all the way to black, with the intermediate values in between. The holes in the center of each value allow me to put the value scale in front of the subject I’m painting and identify its value. I’ve made a similar value scale exclusively for quilters, and its available in my class Color Wheel Recipes. It’s a tool you won’t see anywhere else, and you can learn how to make one for yourself by taking the class at Sew Memorable.
The quilt above is really all about value, not hue. I selected the center panel first, and I wanted it to be the star, not the rest of the quilt. I didn’t want the other fabrics or designs to overwhelm the center. So, I used only light to medium values. I originally selected a chocolate brown fabric with white pin dots for the border, but it was way too dark and it completely overwhelmed the center panel. It wasn’t about the brown; instead, the value of the brown was too dark. So I selected the stripe instead, as it contained light to medium values, with a touch of the dark brown. I could have selected a fabric in any hue as long as the value wasn’t too dark.
Next up: Intensity
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