I’m working on another fish quilt. I’m not sure quite how these fish will go together, but I’m aiming for three different colorations out of the same color range.

I wanted gold fish. But good fish are not made of the same gold. Why? Well, seven fish all colored identically seems fishy to me. The nature of nature is variance.

So I pulled a range of colors that went through yellow greens and orange golds.

Coloration is about filling in space to a large degree. A large space accommodates a large range of colors. Usually colors are set with a base dark color, a shadow color, a range of progressively lighter colors, a shocker color and a lightest shade on top as a highlight. Except when it’s not. That works very well with large areas.

Fish have scales which usually aren’t that large. Usually there’s room for a base color, a shader, a center color, a shocker and then a highlight. This gets more limited as the fish get smaller.

For each of the small fish there’s a base color, a shader, the next brighter color, a softer shader and the next brightest color. I’m putting a shocker around the eye and in the bottom fins.

So I’ve done four fish in red/green, yellow/purple, orange/blue, and yellow orange/ purple, to explore the progressions on this. You’ll notice all the shaders are complements.

It’s a trick to have a number of elements in a quilt with different colors to match each other in tone. Since I’m choosing threads off the neon fluorescent chart, that kind of takes care of that.

There are three large fish, but I wanted to do several fish in the full range. Here are process shots on four of them.

Fish One

Fish Two

Fish Three

Fish Four

Notice what a difference in makes to outline them for the second time! The stitching inevitably creeps over the outline, so they need to be crisped up, sort of like fish sticks.

So here are the fish in process, small ones finished large ones left to go on the background. I worried about them feeling too different, but the range gives them variation without seeming like they don’t belong.