How fibre blending works – a lesson from the FIFA World Cup

I was watching one of the matches from the FIFA World Cup and noticed something interesting.

The game was USA v Paraguay. From the wide aerial shot, the USA uniforms looked pink. But when the camera zoomed in, you could clearly see they were actually made up of red and white stripes.

It reminded me of how colour works in fibre art.

Unlike painters, we can't physically mix fibres together to create a new colour. Instead, we blend different coloured fibres side by side. Viewed from a distance, your eye combines those colours and perceives something entirely new.

It's the same principle used by the Pointillists. Tiny dots of different colours, placed close together, create the illusion of another colour when viewed from afar. Only when you move in close do you discover that the "new" colour never really existed. It was simply your brain blending the individual colours together.

That's exactly how fibre blending works.

So the next time you're trying to create a soft grey, a warm green, or a subtle skin tone with wool, remember that you're not really making a new colour. You're creating an optical illusion that your viewer's eye does the work of completing.

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