Colors: The Basics

Putting together an outfit, making a painting, designing your blog or website, painting the house, putting together the interiors of our house, one of the common link between all these activities is picking up the color or coordinating other things around one color. Sometimes we keep scratching our heads but the things do not really come together the way we had imagined. And the worse situation is when you have to describe the color you have imagined to a third party. How many times has it happened that we are picturing a color in our mind but are not able to explain it ??? or we want to use multiple colors together but have no clue how to pair them up????

Her I am outlining a basic guide to color selection but then first we need to start from the basics.

The Color Wheel

Developed by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666, is the basic tool to depict the main hues/colors from which the other colors are derived.
Now color can be divided into 3 categories: Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Colors.

Primary Colors: The ones which can not be made by mixing any other colors.
Red, Blue Yellow

Secondary Colors: These are in between the primary colors and are made by mixing 2 primary colors.
Orange = Red + Yellow
Green = Yellow + Blue
Violet = Red + Blue

Tertiary Colors: These are formed by mixing a primary and a secondary color

 There lies a full spectrum of colors between the each primary and secondary color as shown below:

Color Terminologies: Hue, Tints, Shades and Tones

Hue: Hue is what we talk about when describing a color or color family like red, blue or green. It is the 

"pure" color. 

                                                    

Tint: Add white to a Hue and you get a tint. So "tinting" a color maenad adding white to it. Like Pink is a tint of the hue red

Shade: Its a result of adding black to the hue. Like garnet is a shade of red.

Tones: Adding both black and white to a hue gives a tone, i.e we are aging grey to the hue. It is done to reduce the intensity of the hue.

So this is how a hue looks on a color wheel with its tints and shades:

Color Harmony

Color Harmony in the simplest way is to pair up 2 or more colors and to make sure that they look good together. Many a times we are in a fix when we want to work with more then one color, e.g You want that your living room should have 3 colors with blue being the main color, but you do not know how to pick up the other 2 colors, or, you want to color block your outfit and you have picked up a pink skirt as the main element of your outfit and now you have to decide whether to pair the pink with 2 or 3 colors and how to choose these colors. To make sure that the colors chosen are in perfect harmony, we need to follow a color scheme. There pre-defined color schemes form the basis of all the color combinations we make. What I have explained further is true for all the hues including their respective tints, tomes and shades.

Let us understand the concepts of core and accent colors in a color scheme, followed on by how to pick a particular color scheme:

Core Color: Its the main/dominant color of the color scheme. Its the main color of the outfit, room, or painting

Accent Colors: These can be 2, 3 or more and can be chosen in the following formats:

Analogous:
Colors which are next to each other on the color wheel. 2, 3 or more colors can be chosen for perfect harmony.

Complimentary:
Colors which are directly opposite each other on the color wheel. This color scheme represents the most dramatic contrast and it should be used in light doses until and unless the impact desired is very loud.

Split-Complimentary:
Choose a color and then choose the 2 colors on either side of its compliment. This again has a great contrast but a little less intensity then the complimentary color scheme.

Triadic:
3 colors which are equidistant from each other and make an equilateral triangle. To use this color scheme, for best results, let one color to dominate and other two be the accents.

Tetradic / Rectangle:
Two pairs of complimentary colors which form a rectangle. Again let one color be the core color.







Square :
Similar to rectangle color scheme except that all the four colors are equally spaced forming an equilateral square











Warm and Cool Colors:
Warm Colors are red, yellow and orange
Cool colors are blue, green and violet
Two warm colors with one cool color or two cool colors with one warm color creates a dynamic harmony.

Some other schemes:

Monochromatic Colors : Same color but used with own tint, tone or shade

Achromatic Colors : Neutral colors like White, Black, Grey or Beige

P.S : I hope this post will be beneficial to all in one way or the other. Do let me know if you want more such posts with Color as the main subject