Planning to use orange wraps on a "fisher" bamboo rod. Looking for a color for small accent wraps. No metallic please. Any ideas on a second color? Thanks for any input.

Good Morning Skip,
It depends on the orange. If it is a rust orange, I would try a teal color. If it is a bright orange I would go with either a green or a blue. Depending on your color tastes, you might try a a dark cobalt blue or a dark forest green.

When choosing colors, the choice always depends on the individual. How you perceive colors varies from person to person. If you have sufficient colors, I would do test wraps on the rod blank and see how you like the colors. Good luck with your project.

Mike Blomme

Right now I am in the middle of restoring a Heddon #50. Rusty orange wraps that are tipped with a light olive green. I've also seen shades of brown from light tan up to dark chocolate work. While black is an obvious choice it can sometimes look too Halloweenish depending on the orange. Bright orange with a turquoise trim does evoke a sort of 1950's feel. I've used that combo on several older white glass fly rods.

I believe nice chestnut brown would work well

For a more simplistic approach to get some free designer assistance:
Sometimes when I get stuck for a complimentary color, I take a spool of thread to my local Sherwin Williams or big box type store where they have a paint scanner to match colors. I'll scan a spool and then get the color card with that scanned color. Then, I'll adjust the system choices to give me a variety of color suggestions to go with it and I grab samples of those. When I get home, I'll run the samples by spools and usually find a few close matches. Then, I'll wrap up a couple samples with the colors and see what I (or the customer) likes.


Here's a really long answer you may categorize as TMI, but I'll toss it out there for others who might read this thread and want to explore some possibilities:
For more advanced color selection techniques, if you have a basic to intermediate knowledge of color matching approaches and some experience with how to use a color wheel, software like paletton can help you come up with some really interesting combos you would not likely consider on your own. Some thread MFG like Madeira can provide RGB (or other color identifiers) values for their thread which you can input into paletton and then you can work the software suggestions back through the RGB charts to specific spools of thread. In some cases, you might need to use a third party color translator to get different color measurement values to cross reference; you can find these online by doing a google search. An example, if you have a hex color value for burnt orange of CC5500, you can convert it to RGB and get values of R (204) G (85) and B (0).

There are some mathematical concepts to color matching that can be quite challenging to try to learn at first (even with a bit of help and instruction), but once learned are really easy to apply. Paletton attempts to simplify concepts like working with monochromatic, adjacent, triad and tetrad color combos. Finding mathematically complimentary colors using each method is just a click of the mouse in the software.

[paletton.com]

is it a blond bamboo or flamed medium or dark? should look cool with orange. are you going traditional with silk or nylon thread? color preserved? color choices are very personal. i would go minimalist and use white, color preserved white with no CP on the orange. maybe even black. some type of red would keep it in the same spectrum as the orange.

eric
fresno, ca.

Dark blue.

Take a look at this web site, it is a professional color selection page. Takes a little playing with it to become proficient, but illustrates practically any color combination imaginable

It is especially great when you are building on a colored blank..

[paletton.com]

When in doubt on color of accent bands of any lighter color thread, black will often work when others don't really satisfy you.