Understanding The Color Wheel

Color plays such an important role in our lives, our wardrobe, and our home décor. Whether your home feels cozy, warm, and inviting or sophisticated, cool, and professional depends a lot on the colors you choose. Color is very important to your home décor yet choosing color combinations that work together can be a very intimidating process especially if you are new at home decorating. Start by understanding the color wheel.

Once you understand the color wheel you will find it much easier to decorate your home and obtain the look and feel you want. Why do you think the color wheel is the professional interior designer’s most used tool? This simple tool, the color wheel, is probably the most important tool of all.

You’ll find pure colors on the color wheel like bright red, pure violet, and vibrant orange but chances are these aren’t colors you are going to want to use or if you do it will be in very limited quantities. But where are those colors you always find in the home décor magazines? Why aren’t they on the color wheel? Maybe that’s why you’ve never bothered to use a color wheel.

Once you understand how to use the color wheel you’ll realize it’s the most powerful tool you have and you will quickly become inseparable because within the color wheel are wonderful harmonious colors. You’ll quickly learn how to build color schemes from scratch or revamp existing ones.

After the primary colors the color wheel is used for creating secondary colors. You’ll find these secondary colors located above their corresponding primary color. This is called the subtractive process because the secondary color has absorbed color from the first color.

When you mix a primary color with another primary color you get a secondary color which is also called complimentary color. So if you mix red and yellow you get orange which is a complimentary or secondary color. If you mix blue and red you get violet which is a complementary color.

The color wheel consists of yet another ring which is found above the secondary colors and is divided into 12 sections. Here you will find the tertiary colors. These are colors that are created by mixing one secondary and one primary color. So for example mixing blue and violet gives you blue-violet which is a tertiary color.

If you want your room to feel strong and solid use solid primary colors. Yellow, blue, or red are great choices. You can use them as a pure color or mix with other hues. You can mix all three, use two, or just choose one. They are perfect for any type of room – modern, traditional, contemporary, or country.

Secondary colors can be tinted with white or black to make them lighter or darker in variation. So if bold green and orange doesn’t work for you think about using paler shades such as sage and peach. You can quickly create a triadic scheme by using any three colors that are the same distance from each other on the color wheel.

The tertiary colors when combined can provide a sophisticated look. Blue-green, red-orange, blue-purple, or yellow-green are all tertiary colors. Of course there are others. Use these when you want to create a professional, sophisticated, and serious room.

Monochromatic means one color and it can be awfully bland unless you use a subtle variation with it. So for example orange, peach, and coral offer subtle variations within the same family adding life to your room but still staying with a monochromatic room.

Once you understand how the color wheel works and the role that color plays in your home decor you’ll be decorating like a pro in no time!


Deon Melchior is the Editor and Publisher of Article Click. For more FREE articles for your ezine and websites visit ArticleClick.com. Article Click is a free content article directory. This means that as a publisher you may reprint the articles that are included in our site, as long as the article is unedited and the author box is included with it's live hyperlinks.