Primary Colors - Adventure or Challenge?

If you talk about a primary color combination, the first thing that might come to mind is the inside of a kindergarten... pure hues of red, yellow, and blue have a tendency to be pretty intense, and especially daring as a fabric combination. For this week's #summerstackfridays link-up, for those following along with the weekly theme, a primary color palette just might be as challenging as one can get... but why no put a little twist on it?

Let's just start out with red... what happens when you add white? You end up with pink. And depending on how much white you add to it, depends on how light or dark a pink it is. Even a pink would still "technically" be in the red family. My red has a slight orange touch, and has been lightened, which means that am now working with tints of red. (a tint is a color + white) I've toned the intensity down, which will give less contrast when I combine it with the other colors.  Even though the bottom fabric has more of a pinkish-lilac background, the coral-red flowers connect to the other "red" fabrics that I've pulled.

For my yellows, again, I've not selected the purist hue of yellow, but have picked a warmer hue. This yellow is headed towards orange, but is still arguably in the yellow family. Because these yellows have added grey to them, they start to get a little muddy. When working with such muddy hues, they don't "bite" as much as when you are combining only pure hues.

Since there are limited names for colors, we often have a tendency to use a general color name, rather than specific color name. Obviously when you mix blue and yellow, then you end up with green. In this case, even though there is a lot of green in my blue, I don't feel like I can call it green just yet. For my primary color palette, I am really using secondary and tertiary colors. Those are just essentially the more specific colors in between the secondary colors. My red moves towards orange, and so does my yellow, and my blue moves towards green - a primary color palette with a twist!

So, when mixing your primary color fabrics for the link-up tomorrow, think about how you can put a little twist on your colors... do you want to lighten them? darken them? use muddy hues?  I hope that this second glance makes working with a primary color palette more of an adventure and less of a challenge. I''ll be sharing the full fabric stack tomorrow for the #summerstackfridays link-up... it's not too late to join in!