Blue shading

Instead of going straight on to the second rainbow I got distracted, as usual, by the question of shading. Specifically, how well changing from a dark to a light colour works by comparison to changing thread thickness. To do that I found three colours that were designed to work as dark, medium and light tones of the same colour.

I started by simply shading between the different colours all at the same thickness, 1strand, which worked but lacked the dramatic impact of shading in black. When trying changing thickness I couldn't use sewing machine thread as the thinnest like I did when experimenting with black because I don't have an appropriate colour so I had to go with 1, 2 and 3 strands of embroidery silk. I  then did two tries at shading using both thickness and colour. I broke up the pattern identically for all three tries  but for the two with different thicknesses the first was simple and the second was further broken down so that some of the darker shade were reduced to thinner strands and some of the lighter shade were done thicker. To make that clearer the first picture bellow shows all the darkest 3 strand stitches and the second shows with the 2 strand stitches included.

The difference at this stage appears minimal. Even when the whole thing was completed there was not a major difference between the two tries.

The second is smoother both visually and too the touch, especially between 2 and 1 strands where the difference in thickness and colour intensity is more readily noticed by the naked eye, but the first does not stand out as noticeably bad. It is clear though that using thickness, by whichever method, is much better than simply relying on colour.