Mastering Colour Blending in your Needle Felted Pictures

Needle felting is all about texture and colour. With a huge range of coloured fleece available, felting offers endless opportunities to create stunning pictures, from bold sunsets to stormy seas. Unlike painting, where you can mix pigments on a palette, needle felting needs a different approach to colour blending, one which requires layering of colour and a little patience. In this post I will walk you through some of my favourite techniques to create smooth, rich transitions in your colour blending.

1. Layering Wisps for Gentle Transitions

   One of the most effective methods of blending colours is layering thin wisps of wool. Combining multiple thin layers of different coloured fibres will give you better results than one single thick layer.

   
   

   

   Blending wisps of green to create a mottled bacoground for a woodland scene

   
   

   Start by placing fine, flat pieces of fleece down onto your background. Rather than needle felting each layer one at a time, I find the colours blend more effectively when you place several differently coloured layers all in one go, then needle felt them at the end. In my workshops I call this process 'layering a pillow of colour'.

   
   

   

   Layering a pillow of colour using several shades of blue, turquoise and lilac to create an interesting sky.

   
   

2. Directional Needle Felting

   Felting direction can influence how the eye perceives colour. By placing down fibres in strokes and felting them in the same direction, you can guide the viewer's eye and help colours flow into each other. This works particularly effecively in areas like skies, water or tall grasses. Try placing fibres diagonally in a sunset sky or vertically for the bark of a tree.

   
   

   Creating a flowing field of lavender

   
   
   
   

3. Using Contrasting Colours for Depth and Shading

   To add dimension, don't just blend similar shades. For example, a touch of purple in the underside of a red toadstool can be just what you need to emphasise the three dimensional shape of a toadstool cap. Sometimes the most unexpected combinations add the most interest.

   
   

   

   Tiny touches of purple add shadow to the underside of the Fly Agaric toadstool cap.

   
   
   
   

   Final Thoughts

   The beauty of needle felting is that it is very forgiving and allows so much scope for experimentation. You can try different colour combinations and vary the thickness or direction of your layers - you can always add more or gently pull back if needed.

   
   

   

   I hope you enjoyed this brief overview of the colour blending techniques I use in my artwork and workshop provision. Thank you for reading!