Color Theory: Part 1

As I continue plugging away on the library, the world comes further and further out of the greige era of the past several years and into the technicolor design that I have always gravitated to, I decided to share a little on how I think about color in homes.  The basics go right back to primary school days with understanding the color wheel, tints, shades, and tones.

But there is so much more to how color works in a home.  From different types of color schemes, to how lighting affects color, and how undertones and overtones can change everything.

Color Wheel

The basics of color start back in primary school with the color wheel.  Each of the three primary and three secondary hues project different things, and historically have been used in different ways.  It is typical to divide the color wheel into two halves: warm hues, and cool hues.  Warm colors -red, orange, and yellow- provide a sense of energy and can infuse a space with vibrance.  While cool colors -green, blue, and violet- invoke a sense of calm and relaxation.

Further, color has two different wheels: a color wheel reflecting pigments and physical color, and a color wheel reflecting light refraction. A painted rainbow looks very different than one in the sky, and the properties of each are a little different.  Mostly, when selecting paint, the pigments are the focus, However when selecting light bulbs, LED strips, and even holiday lights understanding the colors of light is essential.

Hues, Tints, Shades, and Tones

Each hue on the color wheel is divided into primary and secondary hues. In pigments, these are red, yellow, and blue.  In the light wheel, these are red, green, and blue.  These hues combine to create the secondary colors.  For pigments: green, purple, and orange.  For light, these are magenta, cyan, and yellow.  The combinations for light are also the combinations for most printer ink.  Because as more light is added, the closer to pure white the light becomes.  The inverse is true for pigments; as more pigments are added, the closer to black a color becomes.

Adding white, black, and gray also affects each hue.  By adding white, a hue is tinted lighter, by adding black, a color is shaded darker, and by adding gray, the color is shifted into a desaturated tone.  The combinations of different hues with shades, tints, and tones is what gives us the walls of color and different options as we plan colors for different spaces.

Overtones and Undertones

Overtones are fairly easy to understand: these are the main hue that is noticed in a color.  The majority of paint suppliers will have colors organized by the overtone first when arranging the walls of paint cards.  These will range typically as a rainbow, ranging from reds to purples and from tints to shades.

Undertones are a little more tricky, and these can affect the mood of different colors.  The undertone is a color separate from the most noticeable hue.  Often, undertones play a huge role in neutral paints instead of in paints with a strong color hue as the base.  The wall of whites may look all the same in a color deck, but the different undertones can drastically change how they look on a wall.  Undertones are often the color that is reflected off a neutral surface.

One quick way to figure out the undertone on a neutral color is to set it on a blank piece of printer paper.  For finding undertones in a color, compare it to the most pure version of its overtone.  This can be easy digitally by getting the hex code from the manufacturer’s website.

Hex codes for the color wheels are:
Red: FF0000
Orange: FFA500
Yellow: FFFF00
Green: 00FF00
Blue: 0000FF
Magenta: FF00FF
Purple: 800080
Black: 000000
White: FFFFFFred, yellow, and blue.

Another way to find undertones and reflected tones is to shine a bright light -preferably daylight or a daylight bulb- onto a surface and see what colors bounce back onto plain white paper or onto a white ceiling.  This is key to understanding how the existing colors will interact with what is introduced into the room.

More on how this works with light in the next one!