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Color Combo Special #3: Analogous Color Schemes
Analogous color schemes are taken from a 1/4 piece of the color wheel with varying hues, values and saturations.
Analogous color schemes provide a classic balance between variety and similarity that is both timeless and universally appealing. While monochromatic schemes might be the #1 most reliable color strategy for conservative purposes, analogous schemes are a good way to add a little bit of flavor without departing too far from the beaten path of easy-to-match colors.
How is an analogous color scheme developed? Using a near-identical technique to the monochromatic scheme, good analogous schemes are built upon the foundation of one initial color. Whether this first color is a personal favorite, or a pre-existing ‘given’ color in the architecture, it will be the color around which the rest of the color scheme pivots.
Working from there, you locate that color on the color wheel, and then take a look at its immediate neighbors. With blue, for example, green and purple are the immediate neighbors, and hues from the green and/or purple range could therefore be used in any combination to create an analogous color scheme. With a range of roughly 1/4 of the color wheel available, you are free to pick and choose the hues, values, and saturations that you find the most appealing. While you need to be aware of how much contrast you are adding to your composition by varying the value and saturation (i.e., using bright colors, versus pastels, versus dull earth tones), you can be pretty confident that most combinations you come up with, provided they are confined to that tight segment of the color wheel, will be pleasing and unlikely to clash.
One of the benefits to analogous color schemes is that it can offer a great degree of internal variation while maintaining a constant mood, tone, or psychological ‘temperature’. A ‘warm-toned’ analogous scheme can have deep oranges, dull reds, and bright yellows – each underscoring the warmth of the composition in a distinct way. A ‘cool-toned’ analogous scheme, alternatively, might employ blues, greens, and violets with the opposite psychological effect, but an equal degree of internal consistency.
The analogous color scheme is the first color strategy that we’ve discussed so far that allows for some creative variation, putting the final choice to your discretion. Using your natural aesthetic instincts is a good way to choose which specific color alignments really click, and which are discordant. Make sure to envision the colors in the proper proportions, and covering a large surface area, when you are making the final decision. Remember, there is no harm in purchasing a few quarts of paint and coloring in a sample area – sometimes you can be very surprised by how a color looks when spread out over a large surface!
If the choices involved in crafting an analogous color scheme are too much for you, you might want to consider looking into a monochromatic scheme, or turning to our complimentary color consultation service for support. If, on the other hand, you like the challenge and the creative potential involved in the analogous scheme, and you’d like to learn some techniques that allow for even more creativity, stay tuned for our next Color Combo feature: the Complementary Color Scheme!
Color Combo Special #2: Monochromatic Schemes
This is an example of a very natural monochromatic color scheme. It's warm and inviting, isn't it?
Monochromatic schemes are probably the easiest way to “get it right” when it comes to color combinations. Practical for staging houses and other times when a tried-and-true method to create a simple, pleasing decor is what you want, monochromatic combinations follow a simple formula that gives you nearly guaranteed success.
That formula? Just pick one color. It could be your favorite color, the color that creates the mood you’re trying to inspire, or the color that will appeal to the widest possible audience. For staging purposes, it is usually good to go with a light-toned, space-creating neutral like white, cream, or beige. For personal decoration purposes, think of a color that you will really enjoy over a long span of time, and in many different moods.
Once you’ve picked your color, you get to do the fun part. Without varying the core color, or hue, in color classification lingo, create several different shades of that color by varying the value (lightness or darkness), and the chroma (brightness or dullness). You can start with a buttery cream, for example, and mix in black to create a darker umber color for one of the accent colors, and then turn up the intensity to create a bold, warm mustard yellow for another. As long as you stay within the same hue (or an extremely tight range), you can play with the value and the chroma almost indefinitely, and you will still end up with a pleasing color combination. The variation created by the shading will give your composition texture, but your colors are very unlikely to ever clash.
And there is actually a surprising range of effects you can create using a monochromatic scheme. For example, a blue-based scheme that starts with a main color of bright cornflower blue, and accents it with a strong navy and a shocking bright-sky color, is going to make a much bolder statement than a dull blue-gray that is accented with a paler blue-gray and some slate-colored trim, even though in both cases you have essentially an all-blue room.
Remember to take into account the other objects in your composition that will provide colors that you might not have predicted: your rugs, furniture, and other decorations in your interior, or your bricks, deck, patio, roof, and landscaping in your exterior. If it becomes too difficult to keep everything exactly the same color, you might want to look into analogous color schemes as a method of providing more variety, which will be discussed in the next installment. Stay tuned!
Color Combo Special #1: Monotonal Schemes
This is very close to monotonal, but not quite there. Still, it's quite a bold color scheme.
Sometimes, extreme conservatism can turn into daring.
As a general rule of thumb for design, the more colors you use in a decoration scheme, the bolder or “louder” that design becomes. And the bolder it gets, the more clever you need to be to keep all the wild colors you choose from clashing with each other. Also, the more “personal” the scheme becomes – meaning that its effect is unique, impressive, and creative, but may appeal to a smaller set of viewers than a more conservative collection of colors (for this reason, bold color schemes are not usually recommended for staging houses). For those who want to take the easy road with their design scheme, however, fewer – and more neutral – colors are what the doctor usually orders.
Usually. True monotonal color schemes are the exception that proves the rule. A “monotonal” color scheme is one in which only one color is used. Literally, only one color. For interiors, that would be the same color for the walls, ceilings, furniture, rug, flooring material, etc. For exteriors, that would be the same color for the siding, brick, doors, window trim, chimneys, etc. And where the use of just a few neutral colors with little variation around the color wheel can create a mellow, conservative composition, the use of literally one shade of one color on everything looks daring and wild – and most of the time, rather overwhelming.
That’s because you will almost never find a scene in nature composed of only one color. When you look closely at a stream bed full of seemingly “gray” pebbles, you’ll find that upon closer inspection, the rocks are a veritable crayon box of different hues; lights and darks, reds and blues, stripes and speckles. To come upon a scene where there is only one color, no matter how closely you inspect the details, is to come upon a scene that shows off humanity’s control over our environment in a rather startling manner.
Such aggressive monotonality has been a hallmark of certain edgy modern styles. An all-white living room or an all-red dining room creates a living space that really attracts a lot of notice, and garners a certain amount of respect in some social circles for the bold statement that it makes. With only one color, the variety of textures and light sources in a space get thrown into high relief, creating a fascinating visual effect. In some cases, a monotonal color scheme can be made even more vivid by breaking the strict adherence to one color only by adding a bright, splashy accent color.
However, for many of us, a monotonal color scheme does not provide for a very relaxing living space. The same field of uniform color that is exciting and edgy in a club or restaurant can quickly become grating and irritating when you have to look at it day in and day out. When you start at the far edge of uniformity, allowing some variety into your color scheme will actually make it more relaxing, less conspicuous, and more conservative. Taking that first step into variety brings you out of the monotonal color scheme and into the monochromatic scheme, which we will discuss in our next installment in this series. Stay tuned . . .
How Are Colors Classified?
A few examples of changes in hue.
Artists and poets have fallen in love with color for as long as there has been human culture, and there are a million beautiful color names that have been invented to describe the rich palettes that fill our world. However, in an attempt to standardize a language of color for optimal communication, and to bring color analysis into the realm of science, several color classification systems have been developed. The Munsell Color System, created by Albert H. Munsell in the early 1900s, is an example of a good, comprehensive classification system for organizing colors and analyzing the relationships between them.
Albert Munsell observed that the colors we see actually have three different dimensions, which vary independently of each other. Two of these dimensions come from the two types of photoreceptive cells in our eyes, and the third is a combination of the two working together.
The Three Characteristics of Any Color
1. Hue – the particular wavelength in the rainbow or color wheel (detected by the cones in the eye)
2. Value – the lightness or darkness of the color, measured by the amount of black and white mixed in (detected by the rods in the eye)
3. Chroma (Sometimes called “intensity” or “saturation”) – the degree of pure color versus neutral tones (black/white/gray) in the mixture (detected by the rods and the cones together)
When you discuss color for the purposes of architectural decorating, all three of these characteristics are important, and all of them have a distinct impact on the color scheme that they create. The hue, for example, determines the warmth or coolness of the color, and also plays a role in its psychological impact (we will discuss the basic psychological impact of all of the basic rainbow colors in another installment). The value determines how much light the color reflects, which plays a role in “color contouring“, or using color to affect the perceived dimensions of a space. Lighter colors make an area look lighter and more spacious, while darker colors make an area look heavier and more enclosed. Finally, the chroma of a color plays a strong role in how aggressively the color grabs your attention. If you want your decor to fade into the background, you want to use colors of a lower chroma than if you want your decor to attract attention.
When deciding on a color scheme, consider the hue, value, and chroma of all of your colors carefully, and watch how you mix and match – there is an infinite variety of beautiful color schemes out there.
What Is Color?
Discussion of Color Relevant to Painting and Refinishing in the Washington, DC Area
What, exactly, is color? It is such a pervasive aspect of our lives that the question almost sounds absurd. Color is color, and there isn’t anything else to it. However, a deeper understanding of the physics and biology that create our experience of color can shed light on some of the intricacies of picking color for an interior or exterior painting project.
Human perception of color results from sensitive tissues in our eyes registering visible light of differing wavelengths and intensities. Red light has the longest wavelength, shrinking as we proceed down the rainbow all the way to violet light, which has the shortest wavelength of the visible range. Having visual sensitivity to this specific range of the electromagnetic spectrum (ie, being able to see in color) has been evolutionarily critical for human beings, because color is such a helpful cue in navigating our environment. Important objects in our environment – like plants, water, and other animals – are more easily identified by their characteristic colors.
The path from a beam of light to our mental perception of color, however, has multiple steps involved. First, light comes into our eye, both directly from a light source (such as when you look straight at a neon light), and also reflected off of the objects around us. When reflected off of the objects in our environment, that light gives us critical information about our surroundings. To formulate our visual field, and help us navigate, our eyes collect two kinds of information; the color’s value and the color’s hue, and there is a specialized type of photoreceptive cell in our retina (the area on the back of the eyeball that receives light) for each.
First, the rods in our retina collect information about how much (or little) light is being reflected off of each surface, we see giving us a visual field full of bright spots and shadows. The amount of reflected light coming off of an object is sometimes called its color “value”, and it can be depicted on a grayscale. Perceiving color values in our environment is critical for depth perception; our brain analyzes the lights and darks to figure out what is in the foreground, what is in the background, and what direction the light is coming from.
Unless you are black-white color blind, there is also a second set of photoreceptive cells in your retina, called the cones, which are oblivious to the amount of light coming in, but instead react to the wavelength, “color”, or “hue”, of that light. In perceiving wavelength, the cones offer your brain a whole new set of inputs with which to make sense of the visual field. While seeing in black and white is sufficient to detect depth, motion, and all of the fundamental attributes necessary to go about your daily life without bumping into things, color gives you critical information about the state of the objects in the world. A leaf’s color, for example, can tell you if it is alive or dead; a fruit’s if it is green or ripe, an insect’s if it is poisonous or harmless, the sky’s if it is going to stay fair or rain. In nature, many creatures use color as a language to communicate across species lines: the flower encourages insects to pollinate using bright colors, while the bright red frog warns predators that it is poisonous. Perception of hue also lends a finer degree of detail to our sense of space and light; being able to tell that a shadow has a bluish tinge gives us a subtly different understanding than simply sensing how dark it is; perhaps the sun is setting, and the extra orange in the light is giving the shadow its complimentary tinge.
Finally, the information collected from the rods and cones in the eye has to be sent up to the brain in order to turn into a perception. It is here that the brain taps into all the personal associations that you have formed with that particular color, and forms a unique experience of that color for you. So as you can see, color perception is a complicated process, and one that allows for a wide variety of color perception between individuals.
Can I Paint My Bedroom the Color the Sky Is Right Now?
Discussion of Design, Color Matching, and Spectrophotometry from a Northern Virginia Painting Contractor
Color is an amazing, and elusive, element of life. Our vision doesn’t necessarily depend on it, and in some ways the information it brings us is superficial: it doesn’t tell us about more than the surface of an object. Yet a world without color is undeniably lacking something, and even people who are relatively ambivalent about color are affected by it.
So the process of choosing the colors that you are going to paint your interior – essentially, the colors that you are going to live among – is one that merits serious consideration. There is much to say about interior design and color matching; how to come up with a color scheme from scratch, how to predict how your colors will look when applied to a large architectural surface, etc. But here we are going to focus on the art and technology of what to do when you start your project already knowing what colors you want.
There are three steps to getting your paint to turn out the perfect color. The first step is to get a physical color sample. The next step is to adjust that color sample so that it is perfectly suited for its intended project. The final step is to use a spectrophotometer to create paint that will turn out that color.
Steps one and two provide the greatest challenge if you are trying to match a color from a natural landscape (i.e., the “color the sky is right now”). Visual artists are well aware that the play of light and color in a natural landscape involves a huge array of hues, tones, and contrast, that can be depicted a variety of ways. The blue of a sky in nature is luminescent – it is actually emitting light – and so translating it into an opaque color involves a substantial challenge. It is also subtly and infinitely variable, so using one paint color to mimic it will likely fall flat. In landscape paintings, artists use startling color juxtapositions – like throwing yellow into a blue sky – to achieve the desired results – but in interior design you have to achieve the effect you want a lot more simply.
So when you pick your color, you want to have your whole composition in mind, and you also want to consider, as always with picking architectural paint colors, how intense or overwhelming the colors will look if applied to large surfaces. With colors from nature, this might take some adjustment. Take a picture of the sky, get the photo printed, and then put it up on the wall and imagine how it will look when painted over the whole surface and when put together with your trim, accent, and furniture colors. Trust your instincts: it may actually be a few shades lighter or grayer that you are truly looking for.
Next, you need to bring your color sample – along with any adjustments you might want to make to it – into a paint store. Walk past the showroom area, past the hardware store, and go up to the service counter in the back. Somewhere near the service counter, there should be a computer plugged into a small, shoebox-sized machine. (Hopefully, there will also be a person back there who knows how to operate it!). The machine is called a spectrophotometer, and what it does is analyze the color of whatever physical sample you submit to it and come up with a pigment formula for mixing that paint color. The paint store employee can then take that code and plug it into their paint mixer, creating a bucket of paint in that color.
The spectrophotometer works by bouncing white light off of your sample and onto a light-sensitive detector, which analyzes the spectrum of reflected light and sends that information to the computer. This method is roughly 90% effective; sometimes the color will be slightly off. This is especially true when working from photos or magazines, which sometimes allow light through or have colors behind that bleed, when working with an extremely small sample (you want it to be at least the size of a quarter), or working with metallic colors. So it is important to check your paint when you are finished to make sure you’ve come up with the right color. Also, if you want to have the color be several shades lighter, darker, grayer, etc., than your sample, tell the store clerk before the paint gets mixed. It is a wise idea to initially mix a small amount of paint, which you can take home and test on your surface, before committing to the full amount.
Warm Colors for the Cold Season
Winter Color Consultation Advice from Northern Virginia / Washington DC Painting Contractor
Pop quiz: what color makes a space warmer? Black, or red?
If you answered “black”, then you have a good understanding of basic optical physics. Dark colors absorb more heat than light colors, and therefore make a space physically warmer.
If you answered “red”, however, then you are tapping into a much more subtle, psychological concept of ‘temperature’. In study after study, it has been discovered that the colors at the long end of the spectrum – red, orange, and yellow – seem “warmer” to the majority of people, while the colors at the opposite end of the spectrum – green, blue, indigo, and violet – seem “cooler”. Although the hue doesn’t have any actual bearing on the physics of heat absorption, the psychological impact of a color’s ‘temperature’ can play an important role during the winter season.
Using warm colors in your interiors can go a long way toward warming up a space and raising spirits during the long, dark, cold months. Red is a hot, feisty color that raises energy, encourages liveliness, and stimulates the appetite. Orange is fun and wild, invoking playful scenes from the hot months of summer and similarly raising the energy in the room. Yellow is sunny and cheerful, mimicking the expansive feel of a sunny day. All three colors can slightly increase heart rate, making you feel warmer even when the physical temperature stays the same.
Where do these temperature associations come from? They probably come from our ancestral experiences in nature. Red, for example, is typically used as an attention-getting signal in the animal kingdom, whether the attention is sought in order to attract or to warn. Many poisonous creatures are red – but so are delicious, edible berries. Red (along with orange and yellow) is also the color of fire. So the human instincts are designed to sit up and take notice around the color red – which feels exciting and therefore ‘warming’. Orange has a similar set of natural associations, and yellow has an even more direct connection to feelings of heat: it is the color of warm sunlight. Black, on the other hand, although it is physically the best heat absorber, is paradoxically associated with night, which has dark, mysterious, and cool connotations, rather than invoking warmth.
How can you use a warm color palette to warm your spirits? Use warm colors to paint kitchens, dining rooms, sun rooms, and family rooms – social areas where people gather to eat, drink, talk, and while away the cold hours of winter. Even on the coldest day, a warm color scheme will enliven your space and create a sensation of heat and comfort even on the darkest, coldest nights Old Man Winter has to offer.
