An In-depth lesson in colour

Strap in, this is a technical one! For those of you interested in understanding colour beyond the basics of the colour wheel, this blog is a deep dive into the techinical breakdown of a colour and its related shades and hues. This can help you to build a really successful colour scheme even if you don’t have a natural eye for colour, and can indeed help you to train your eye for colour.

I thought a good way to explore this topic would be to pick the hardest colour to work with - purple! It’s not a colour I use often as I don’t like a classic royal purple, but this warmer version has cropped up in my design work recently.

Within the industry there are endless creative names for different colours, but there are also more technical ways to label a colour accurately. When it comes to paint it’s actually quite complex, as the descriptions in the image below such as HEX code or HSB refer to the colour as you see it on a screen, made up of pixels. Paint isn’t made of pixels, it’s made of pigment, and the same pigment can look different in different lighting conditions (especially if it’s a natural pigment) so it will not look exactly the same in every room and certainly won’t look the same in real life as it does in a photo. That’s why paint testers are so important! But I digress…

Looking at our colour purple, you can see that using RGB - the red, green and blue light that pixels are made up of - it has slightly more red (133) than blue (107) or green (100). If you had just red and blue (as you might expect you’d use to mix a purple paint), you’d have a saturated royal purple. CMYK relates to the colours of ink you’d need to print this colour, so it’s closer to what colours you’d use to mix a paint.

However, I want to investigate Hue and Saturation. ‘Hue’ is what we think of as colour, and ‘Saturation’ is how bold or muted a colour is. If you took this colour to its full saturation, it’s actually a red not a purple! If grey is 0% and full saturation is 100%, our colour is 25% saturated, so it’s definitely a more muted colour.

You can describe our colour as a purple with red/warm undertones. Identifying undertones is actually more nuanced than this as it also related to what pigments are used to make a colour, so it can relate to hues you can’t identify digitally.

You may be familiar with the idea of ‘clean’ and ‘muddy’ colours, which is about how pure a colour is. Clean colours are primary and secondary colours, the version of red or blue or purple you often find in a kids paintbox. Muddy colours are those such as earth tones, they’re more natural and in terms of paint they are usually made of a more complex recipe of pigments. Our muted mauve is definitely a muddy colour, and the related saturated red is also not a totally clean red.

To find the purest version of our colour, we next need to look at Tints & Shades. A ‘tint’ is a lighter versions of a hue - with white added, whilst a ‘shade’ is darker versions of a hue - with black added. How light/dark a colour is is defined as its Light Reflectance Value (LRV), where pure white has an LRV of 100 (reflecting all light) and pure black has an LRV of 0 (absorbing all light).

Looking at the saturated version of our colour, it’s a darker shade of red. You may remember painting colour scales like the one below in art lessons at school!

This vivid red in the middle is the purest version of our muted mauve, halfway between black and white. To do the journey in reverse, take this red hue, make it a darker shade, then desaturate it to achieve the muted mauve hue. It’s like a recipe! Understanding this journey can help to understand how to work with a colour and what other colours go well with it. For example, identifying that it has red/warm undertones tells you that it works best with a warm off-white.

I started off by saying we would learn how to build a really successful colour scheme. Interior designers talk about creating a ‘layered interior’, which refers to how you build up a room scheme so that it doesn’t look flat, empty or disjointed. Every element in the room contributes to the colour palette, so to create a beautiful room instead of a crazy kaleidoscope, everything needs to be considered to create a cohesive whole. A successful complex colour palette often has 3 core colours in varying proportions.

Using the colour wheel to identify 3 corresponding colours is nothing new - it’s often called a triadic colour scheme. However, understanding how to do that with the sort of muddy, muted hues we often use in decorating is a bit more challenging! If you start by identifying the purest version of your colour, as we’ve done with our muted mauve, you can then easily identify the corresponding hues. In this case, a yellow and blue.

You can take that particular yellow hue and that particular blue hue on the same colour journey through different tints, shades and degrees of saturation to find colours that go well with our muted mauve. Muddy colours go well with other muddy colours, so you might want to find a more muted yellow and blue. Try not to use a lot of colours that have the same Light Reflectance Value together as this can look very flat (and if you have a lot of different hues, it also looks messy).

To create contrast, use either a more saturated version of one of the 3 hues, a much darker version, or a much lighter version. A fundamental rule of successful interior design is to use contrast to create focal points, so this is a really useful way to look at the paint, flooring, textiles and furniture you are choosing.

These fabrics by Octavia Dickinson all work with the wall colour (Tyrion by Edward Bulmer) because they follow this model for creating a colour scheme. The fact that both Amara (the red febric) and Oscar (the yellow fabric) feature the other colours in the triad within the pattern, helps to make it feel cohesive. You would also repeat these colours in other elements throughout the room to bring it together successfully.

It’s worth noting that using triadic colours isn’t the only way to create a successful complex colour scheme, but that’s for another blog! Well done if you made it to the end of this lesson in colour, let me know your thoughts over on the Facebook page!