Read all articles

The Color Wheel - part 1

The Color Wheel by Charlene McClung
Editorial Design Team Coordinator
Scrapbooking.com

Ok, the pictures are cropped, your paper choices are laid out, you've picked out embellishments... you're ready to go, but wait! Something doesn't look right, what is it? It might be COLOR. We all know that color is the most important part of our designing. Color portrays feelings, balance and the mood of the pictures. That's where the handy Color Wheel comes in.

Our world has so many beautiful colors that are reflected in our pictures that sometimes it's hard to know which colors look the best together. I have become such a fan of my Color Wheel. Many times I will turn the wheel and there's a color scheme that I never would have thought of.

The most common color schemes are Complementary, Split Complementary, Diad, Triad and Tetrad. This month we're going to focus on Complementary and Triad.

Complementary harmony is combining a shade, tint, or tone of one color and crossing over to choose the opposite color. The Playful Poppie layout used complementary harmony by combining orange and blue. The pictures certainly called for orange. Orange is such a strong color and I wasn't sure if I should pick up the beiges in the photos to tone down the orange. Out comes the trusty Color Wheel, using the Complementary arrow to orange, blue is the opposite color. Easy, isn't it?

The second layout is a Triad scheme. Triad colors have three colors equally spaced from each other. One well known example is the three primary colors - red, blue and yellow. In the layout Cousins in Cincinnati, I used blue patterned paper, but the color was still primarily blues. Instead of a true red, I chose to use a shade of red, a rust that picked up some rust colors in the background. When I used the rust the pictures seemed to pop off the page.

Next month we'll look at Split Complements and Diad color schemes. In the meantime, while you're out shopping for scrapbook supplies, or on-line at at www.colorwheelco.com, be sure and pick up a tool that you will use over and over again - The Color Wheel or Pocket Color Wheel.

Read Part 2 of The Color Wheel article

This article is published with the permission of Scrapbooking.com.
Copyright © 2003 by Scrapbooking.com, Inc. All rights reserved.