Welcome to the second part of my Pet Portrait Collage Tutorial. In Part One we learned that a range of light to dark values allows us to see depth and dimension in our world. Similarly, the secret to making your collaged pet portrait look real is applying the same concept to your fabric choices. In other words, to make a fabric collage of a white cat or dog, you’ll need fabric values that include white, light to medium grey and black. And for a black one, you would probably still use white and black but the range of greys would be much darker. Regardless of your colour choices, a wide range of values is needed to create depth and dimension in any portrait. You can even include purple, blue, pink, or orange in your portrait, as long as you pay attention to value.

How to Read Value in Fabrics

Once you understand you can use a variety of fabric values to create a dimension and realism, here comes the next hurdle: putting this knowledge into practice. The urge will be to find some nice colours that you think will be suitable. After all, most of us are quite happy choosing fabric colours for our quilts, but not so comfortable reading or judging the relative values of fabric (how light or dark it is). In reality, you need to find fabrics with values that match the values in the photo. But let’s focus on finding the values of your fabrics for now.

Match the values of your fabrics to the values in your photo.

If you’re a quilter, you no doubt have light, medium and dark fabrics in your stash. You may even own some of the tools for identifying values in fabrics (check out your colour wheel for the value finder feature). The challenge we all face is seeing and reading the relative values in our fabrics. That is, how light or dark is a fabric compared to another one sitting next to it? The difference is obvious when comparing very dark to very light fabrics, but for all those fabrics in the ‘medium’ range, it can be more difficult to discern.

Quilter’s Fabric Value Finder

I have been working on this problem since I first learned the importance of value in quilting. Recently I developed a 7-step Quilter’s Fabric Value Finder for reading values in fabric. I use this to teach students how to select fabrics for collage. I can almost see the light bulbs going on across the room when their eyes light up after sorting fabrics of all colours using a tool like this.

Think of the Value Finder as a “ruler” for measuring relative value.

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Here is a group of fabrics that I sorted using the Fabric Value Finder.

This is how it works:

1. Hold a fabric swatch over the hole in the white square and look for any contrast.
2. Move the swatch slowly along the Value Finder one square at a time, looking to see if it contrasts or blends in. You may find it helpful to squint.
3. You will notice that your swatch blends best with one of the squares but contrasts with all the others. This is its relative value.
4. Repeat with all of your fabric swatches.

Note that your fabric may not exactly match the values in the Value Finder, because only 7 values out of an infinite range of greys are represented. This is perfectly fine because value is relative. That is, value 4 is darker than values 1-3 but lighter than values 5-7.  Just place your fabric swatch where it blends in the best. That’s all there is to it. Your fabrics are now sorted by value.

The hole in the centre is a great feature for finding the value of larger pieces of fabric. Just drape the Fabric Value Finder over the fabric and you’ll notice that one of the peekaboo views blends better with its surrounding square than the others. In this example, the green circle with the least contrast is the middle one, value 4. The circles on the right look comparatively lighter while those on the left look darker, making this green fabric’s relative value a 4.

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In the example below, I’ve placed a fabric swatch of matching value over the centre hole in each square. Laying a small piece of fabric on a square of the Value Finder like this helps you see whether it blends or contrasts with the value surrounding it.

Although the swatch in the value 1 square (white) is not a perfect match, it is still lighter than the swatch in the value 2 position. This means its value is 1 relative to the others in this collection of fabrics.

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The Quilter’s Fabric Value Finder works for any colour of fabric. This example uses brown fabrics. Notice that while the fabrics do not always perfectly match the values on the Value Finder square, they are sorted in a sequence of light to dark.

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The last piece of the fabric collage puzzle is learning to read values in your photograph. In the next post, I’ll show you how to do this as you make a pattern from a photograph.

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Are you ready to put this knowledge to use and make a stunning fabric collage Pet Portrait? This exercise is just one small part of the online Pet Portraits course, which you can learn more about here:  Pet Portraits: Fabric Collage.