Welcome to Maxx Home Guides: Decorating & Colors
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Home Decorating Colors and Design
from: Maxx Home GuidesThere are several rules of thumb regarding home decorating colors and design you should know about and follow.
Monochromatic: This is a color scheme using just one color.
Value: This refers to the lightness or darkness of a color. For example, let's say you have a picture on your living room wall above your couch. If you place some lighting to reflect light onto the picture and the light shines on the part of the picture nearest to the light source, this will have the lightest value because it reflects the most light.
The area that shines furthest from the light source will be in the deepest shadow and thus darker in value. What's good is you can change the value of a color. If you add white, the color becomes lighter or higher in value. If you add black, the color becomes darker or lower in value.
Neutral Colors: Neutral colors contain equal parts of black, white and grey. Sometimes brown is also considered a neutral color. When you mix neutral colors to other colors, the value changes.
Warm Colors: These colors represent warmth such as a fire. So oranges and reds are considered warm colors. Warm colors appear larger than cool colors.
Cool Colors: Cool colors represent coolness or iciness such as a blue sky or green trees.
Primary Colors: There's three primary colors -- red, yellow and blue. This means that all colors revolve around these three colors.
Secondary Colors: Secondary colors are obtained by mixing two primary colors together to make a secondary color. Mixing red and yellow creates orange. Mixing yellow and blue gives you green and mixing blue and red will give you purple.
Intermediate Colors: Intermediate colors are created when you mix one primary color with a secondary color. Red/orange, yellow/orange, yellow/green, blue/green, blue/purple and red/purple are all examples of intermediate colors.
Emphasis: This refers to an area of a work of art or a painting that first draws the attention of the viewer. This is the dominant element and the element that catchs the viewer's eye second is called a subordinate element.
Unity: This allows the viewer to see a combination of elements, principles and media. Unity is created by harmony, simplicity, repetition, proximity, and continuation. For example, you could use the repetition of a color scheme to unify a composition.
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