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published by KatieDid Design
Color Basics
by Kathleen M. Peters, www.KatieDidDesign.com
Knowing and understanding color is a basic fundamental necessary for successfully
decorating your home. It's important to be able to recognize the hue,
clarity, and shade of each color you consider so that you can choose wisely
and incorporate them effectively in your home's color scheme. You can't
just go by color names, since every designer, fabric manufacturer, paint
store, and retailer uses their own names and shades. Remember, one
man's lilac is another man's heather. (*smile*)
The most important aspect of color to consider is
hue or tint. The color wheel is a useful tool to help organize the
millions of hues out there.
Imagine a circle, divided into six pie slices.
Each slice is for one of the six basic colors - red, orange, yellow, green,
blue, and purple. It is a rainbow in a circle. Now take away
the dividing lines between each color, and let them blend together... you
now have red-oranges, orange-yellows, yellow-greens, etc. and so forth all
the way around the circle to purple-reds.
Here is a picture of a color wheel to help you visualize it:
http://www.decordecoratinganddesign.com/images/colorwheel.jpg
Every color on earth belongs somewhere on this wheel.
And every color can be muted with black, or have its shade lightened with
white. Let's study it.
Red, yellow, and blue are known as primary colors.
By combining the right amounts of each, every other color on the wheel is
created. Orange, green, and purple are known as secondary colors -
they are really composed of the two colors on either side. So red and
yellow make orange colors, yellow and blue make green colors, and blue and
red make purple colors.
You must learn to see 'into' colors so that you
have a general idea where on the color wheel it belongs, and therefore HOW
MUCH of each primary color is in it. This is called the color's hue
or tint. Let's take green for an example. Pure green - grass
green, as I call it - is exactly half way between yellow and blue.
It is equal parts blue and yellow, so neither primary color really is noticeable.
They cancel each other out. But as soon as more yellow is added, it
begins to look like a yellowish green, like olive green, khaki green, and
apple green. But if more blue is added, then it brings the color the
other way around the color wheel - giving us colors like sea green, teal,
and aqua green. Realize that we are not talking yet about how dark,
light, bright, or muted a color is, but rather which colors contribute to
its tint.
It is important to be able to recognize this when
you're trying to match colors - this is why green is not just green, and
why two separate greens may clash. We'll talk about mixing colors in
next month's article.
Clarity and shade adjust and modify the hue of a
color, and are just as important to understand. They are separate,
but they often work together. A color's shade is simply how light or
dark it is, while the clarity of a color is how clear or muted the color
is. Any hue from the color wheel can be lightened with white to make
it paler, and/or it can be muted with black or grey (which is really both
black and white) to mute it. Neither one of these factors changes the
ratio of primary colors in the hue, it simply adds white and/or black.
This time let's take pink for our example.
Fuchsia is a color that most of us are familiar with. It's mostly red,
with just a hint of blue. Let's say that this particular hue is 90%
red and 10% blue. We can now take that hue and change its clarity by
adding black to darken and mute it to a wine color. We can instead
keep its clarity, but lighten the shade by adding white to get a pale clear
pink. Or we can both mute it and lighten it by adding both black and
white to get a soft mauve. Can you see the difference? All four
'colors': fuchsia, wine, pink, and mauve contain the same red:blue ratio
of 90% and 10%, so they are the same hue and belong at the same place on
the color wheel. But each has a different clarity and shade.
Here is another picture to help you see and compare the difference:
http://www.decordecoratinganddesign.com/images/colorwheel2.jpg
These are the basics of color. When you understand
these fundamentals, and have learned to see 'into' colors, you gain the power
to distinguish between them accurately in a knowledgeable manner. Next read "Creating Great Color Combinations."
Have fun!
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This article Copyright 1999-2004 - Kathleen Peters, KatieDid Design. Reproduced with permission.
Kathleen Peters - 'Katie' - is a custom window treatment and bedding designer, and owner of KatieDid Design, her online shop. She is also the editor-in-chief of Decor, Decorating, and Design, a free bi-monthly ezine filled with articles, tips, and guidelines to help with your home decorating.
http://www.KatieDidDesign.com
http://www.DecorDecoratingAndDesign.com
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