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- You can use The NERBs shade packs to wrap guides, but you must use CP. The thread is thin and can be difficult to wrap guides with. But there are a lot of builders who use it and have no problems. Test for yourself
- If you are just getting into Dec Wraps, start with a couple of the more popular colors: Red, Orange, Neon Green, Royal, Green, Purple, and Smoke. These colors look great, and they match up with most NCP or Nylon threads if you choose to use those to wrap your guides.
- Once you’ve used the shade packs you will see their value: Vibrant colors to enhance your Wraps, easy to work with and pack, and minimal frustration trying to figure out what colors to buy – you will want to order more. You can expand your color choices with some of the “secondary” colors. If you like Blue, there are 5 different packs within this family. Purple has 4, there are a few browns – every color you can think of is contained in one of the shade packs.
- Builders always wonder which grey they should get. If you only want to use 5 shades, get charcoal. If you want to use white and black, which will give you a 7 color shade – get smoke or grey. IMO the best flow from white to black is Smoke.
- How to use the neutral colors to enhance the main color. This is something we learned from James DiCono when he won the May 2012 Wrap Challenge. If you struggle with color selection, you can take almost any shade pack color and combine it with any of the grey shade packs and hit a home run. Nobody’s favorite color is grey, but nobody dislikes it – so it’s hard to miss using it in your wraps. The same can be done using the Bronze and Cork packs and can be seen in the work of Mark Berry. These are neutral colors and can make a wrap explode off the blank when used properly with another color.
- -Super & Combo packs – The more colors you use in a shade, the better the shade will look. Super Orange + Red is awesome! Pink, Magenta and Purple has been very popular. I’ve been combining the Navy and Royal pack since I started using them. The Chestnut Super pack is unique, it looks great with cork and wood handles, and can function as the primary or a neutral color in a wrap, depending on how you lay out the colors. The Green Super pack is nice as well, I added that after people wondered why my green shaded wrap looked like it was glowing. The extra threads for Wintergreen should always be purchased, the 2 extra colors enhance the look. The Golden Olive Super pack has an additional dark thread, which helps the lighter colors pop.
- You can shade light to dark, or dark to light. My preference is light to dark. Even with colors that do not match, Golden olive and Magenta – if you match the intensity of the color through shades you’ll end up with an appealing wrap that does indeed match. That’s what I love about the shade packs, I can take any 3 shade packs and do an In & Out pattern, or a Sparkler – and make it look awesome. So can you.
- Wood Spools – The way I teach how to wrap, is to take each color in a shade pack, and transfer each color to 4 wood spools. Do this for all 5 colors in a shade pack, and you need 20 spools. This allows you to wrap using multiple thread of the same exact color, in bands. This technique is covered in my book