Survey of spoonflower colors - full saturation to black gradient

Spoonflower requires that designers order swatches of their designs before publishing. It's a good policy, because print often looks different than screen, especially with darker colors. Dark blue can easily wind up just being black. Subtle variations are often totally lost.

To help me out recently, I printed a swatch that crosses all hues, fading into black. Here was the original graphic I uploaded:

And here was the printed fabric on kona cotton:

I then made a "color averaged" version.

Now when I design my fabrics in GIMP, I have a two-layer file with my color averaged file on the top layer, "graphic" one underneath. I pick out what I want a color to look like using the color-averaged version, but "grab" the original version of it.

I plan to do some other gradients with this method... for example, I'm still trying to figure out how to get brown. Pastels are a lot easier on spoonflower, much more likely to come out looking like they do on the screen.