Experiencing Joy Through Art

   Glad you are back on this Friday morning! We have reached the end of another week and I’m sure you are looking forward to the weekend. For my Friday post, I wanted to give you some tips to help you in figuring out colors for your décor and design. 

   Over the past couple of weeks I have been discussing various color schemes like complementary and analogous, but an important part of making those ideas work successfully is for you to be able to correctly identify colors. Otherwise figuring out what their complements or analogous partners should be can prove difficult.

  The image below shows white sunlight broken into its familiar rainbow of colors that you learned in grade school. While in reality, the colors blend into one another seamlessly on this spectrum, for artistic purposes they can be organized into the six colors we all learned are in a rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. 

   But wait, we see many more colors than this in the real world, right? It’s said that the human eye can detect over 10 million different colors. I mean, what about colors like brown, burgundy or pink? 

   Well, it boils down to one simple thing and once you understand it, it helps to clear up a lot of confusion. Since the colors that make up white sunlight are only those six in the natural spectrum. Except for white and black, Every color we see must be some version of one of those six colors. If you think about it, this has to be true. There are no brown, burgundy or pink lightwaves in the spectrum. We see these colors because of the way the different colors of light intermix in our brains.

   So browns are really just dark, dull yellows and oranges. Pink is a shade of red. So is burgundy…it's just not pure red at full saturation. Olive green is a dull yellow-green and so on. Once you can look at a color and figure out which of the six base colors of nature it is a variation of, choosing its complement or any other color as an accent becomes much easier. If a brown is a warm brown like Burnt Sienna, that is really an orange—so you can pair it with blues or other warm yellows and oranges. Burgundy is a dark dull red that be used with dark dull greens for a toned down complemetary color scheme.

   Once you see colors this way, it’s almost impossible not to look at the world through new eyes. Coffee and sand?…Yellow. Rust?…Orange. Gold?…Yellow. Silver?…Violet. Sometime when you are out, give it a try…see if you can identify each of the colors in the world around you as one of the spectrum colors.