Hues & Cues: A Game about Colors

 

At Quilt Class this week, we spent the first hour playing a game called Hues & Cues.  

It starts with a game board where colors are mapped up on a grid.  There's a deck of cards where one player picks a color and attempts to describe it to the other players enough so that they can locate it on the board.  They can use 1 word on the first round, and 2 words on the 2nd round, but you can't use the most basic color words to describe it (ie red-green-yellow-blue, etc.)   Even if you say grape or tomato, these fruits and veg come in a variety of colors, so even those specifics made it difficult to pin down.

It was fascinating and challenging!  Yes -- Harder than you might think it would be!

I have new appreciation for going to a quilt shop and asking for any given color, looking for the match in the vision of my mind, but not finding it on the shelf amid a sea of colors in that family--and at a loss to adequately describe it well enough to find it.  I know it when I see it, though!

 

The game board reminded me of dying the color charts in the Candied Fabrics Dye Class years ago.   

These are the Earth & Sky Triads.

We dyed all those colors from 3 basic primary colors -- the colors in the corners.  

We never actually named the resulting colors, but there's a tiny tag in the corner of each square with the color recipe indicating how much blue - yellow - red make any given color on the chart, making them easy to recreate at any time the need arises.  Just look at all those lovely purples in the Sky Triad!

There were days this chart was hanging up in my sewing studio, on the design wall.  Some days, I just liked to sit quietly and BE by my colors.  Soak up my colors  ;-)  My Happy Place 

Some dyers actually bother to name  all the colors they develop.  That's a huge challenge -- and then getting other people to agree that those colors are accurately named!

Then there's the html color codes / color names.   These are the colors your computer can recognize, only 140 named colors.

 It also made me think back to studying the Yoruba language (from Nigeria in West Africa).  At the time, they only recognized 3 colors: white, dark, and brown.

 What are the colors in Yoruba?

This brings us to the three primary colors of the Yoruba: 

• dudu (aro) - Refers to all cold colors which are black, blue, indigo, green
• pupa (osun) - Refers to those warm colors like red, pink, magenta, orange, etc.
• funfun (efun) - Refers to white and all off-white colors

If you want to call something green, you had to say "dark like leaves."  

If you wanted to name brown eggs, you'd have to say "red eggs."

I think that example more than anything else helped me to realize that languages show a whole other way to look at the world -- literally! It's a whole other way of seeing, despite translation.