It goes without saying that, when painting your home, your choice of colour scheme is vitally important. The colours you choose will strongly impact how you home feels to live in, and choosing well is an important consideration. At Pure Painting, we can advise you on your colour choices, and here we’d like to take the opportunity to some of the colour theory we employ when designing colour schemes.
The Components of Colour
There are a lot of different elements that make up a colour, and we need to understand them if we’re going to work with them. The base of a colour is called a hue, and variations of that colour are called tints and shades. Our primary colours that you’re likely familiar with are red, yellow and blue, and those can be combined into the secondary colours, green, orange and violet. If you mix a primary and secondary colour together, you get a tertiary colour, named after the colours they were mixed from. An example would be mixing red and orange to make orange-red, or blue and green to make blue-green. Overall, these combinations give us twelve basic hues to work with, and they can all be found neatly arranged in the colour wheel.
Once you have a hue, we can modify it into a huge range of various colours. We can do this by adding white to it, making it into a tint, or by adding black to it, making it a shade. We can also add shades of grey to hues, with the resulting colour being called desaturated. By creating these variations with white, black and grey, we can create the full array of colours we use in our painting.
Colour Schemes
There’s a huge array of potential colour schemes to consider when designing your home. Thankfully, they can be sorted into various categories, based on what hues they use and where those hues are in relation to each other on the colour wheel. Let’s describe a few of them now.
A complimentary colour scheme involves two hues that are directly opposed to each other on the colour wheel. This makes the colours involves stand out from each other, making them look more vibrant and interesting.
An analogous colour scheme uses a few hues that are directly beside each other on the colour wheel. This arrangement makes the colours harmonise with each other, and you can use the brighter colours in the scheme to help direct the viewer’s eye.
A triad colour scheme involves three hues, spaced evenly around the colour wheel. This can give a room a more complex, colourful look, that doesn’t end up looking chaotic and messy.
So now we understand more about the ideas that underpin colour schemes, but how are they applied to an actual home, and what hues should we pick? At Pure Painting, we have our own in-house colour consultant, who can help walk you through selecting the best colours for your home; making smaller rooms more open, and larger ones more inviting.
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