Mono-tonal Colors

Good evening!  My card tonight is for the color challenge at Splitcoaststampers.  Karen chose Petal Pink, Mint Macaron and Pool Party.  Three beautiful soft pastel colors.  I opted to make a non-traditional color Christmas card and use my September Large Die of the Month from Spellbinders.  This bird can make a variety of card types because it comes with flowers along with these circles which reminded me of ornaments.

Since the colors were all similar in value I decided to make the rest of the card white to add contrast.  This card was actually a bit time consuming.  Although I had the layout pretty much done in my mind it was the bird that gave me trouble.

Why the bird?  The colors this week are very singular in value.  I'd call it monotone but I know that word refers to sound (hence the hyphen in my blog title).  And I can't call them monochrome because that refers to a single hue with varying shade / tones / tints.  Think an all pink color scheme.

Colors that are monochrome can still have a wide variety of contrast and therefore are much easier to work with.  With colors that are mono-value, you need to be careful or your design can be very flat.  Black and white films and old TV are all monochrome but were easy to watch and appreciate by using an infinite variety of greys.

To tell if a color scheme is mono-value, take a photo with your phone and convert to black and white.

Here is my bird in black and white.  You can see the bird is fairly flat.  In the color card the hues of the Pool Party and Mint are quite close but the Pink offers a nice contrast in hue.  In black and white the contrast is quite different - the Mint stands out.  My challenge this week was the similarity of the colors (Mint and Pool Party) and the values (Pink and Pool Party).

Below are some photos of color schemes to help illustrate. The top is this week's colors.  The middle are last week's colors (chosen by me), which are also pretty mono-value although when in color they have great contrast of hue.  The bottom one is an example of monochromatic with a variety of values.

I find  a palette with a contrast of values or hues easier to work with as it allows for greater depth - especially if you aren't coloring your image and are using flat colors, such as die cuts.

To help you visualize values, hues and contrast here are a few more card examples:

I hope I have made you think a bit about color choices in your card making.  Ultimately it all comes down to what YOU like and what YOU think looks good!  I really like how my bird card came out and I view it as a success even though I probably would not have picked those colors.  That is a great thing about color challenges - they can take you out of your comfort zone.  In this case it really made me think and choose carefully.

Products used:

• Dies: Spellbinders Large Die of the Month September; The Stamps Of Life Mini Slimline Stitched Rectangles
• Paper: Basic White, Mint Macaron, Powder Pink, Pool Party
• Accessories: Pine Boughs EF, ribbon, opal accents

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