Don’t Fear! I will not step away from reviewing designers, architects or engineers and the beautiful art they produce. I will however, branch out to other readers and take suggestions from those who may write me. One such need had arisen by way of a design student who was doing an internship with Interior Passion Co LTD. I’d seen great potential in their creativity, however their ability to choose colors or blend materials and patterns was lacking severely. To be honest, this is quite normal in almost every student I meet. Even myself when I entered the starting gate! SHHHHHHH. Be very quiet! I will deny everything!
While the art of creating harmony, tension and a flora of other emotions through the proper use of colors is essential for an Interior Designer’s skill-sets, there are still many others to be understood that are beyond the scope of this article. Ones that can either augment or degrade those choices of color you’ve put together. For now however, we’ll just stick with the very basics of color for this particular post.
How our Brain Processes color
Of course, color is an art onto itself. Some people are lucky enough to be born with an eye for interweaving different colors into an extremely pleasant design. On the other hand, it is essential for Interior Design students to know the science behind what works and what doesn’t. The rest of us that are not bless with the gift of intuition or lack education in design, need to at least know the very basics. Especially, when pursuing a little Do-it-yourself design. But on the bright side, we’re much luckier than the digital art, printing and photo processing professionals who need to know a vast amount more than we do. So let’s move forward on onwards.
We can start by splitting color into its 3 basic attributes.
- Hue or Color
- Value or Lightness
- Chroma or Saturation
Certainly a color wheel will help us out here. The color wheel is a very useful tool for teachers to explain the art of design. We’ve got 12 colors in our basic color chart.
For me, it’s easy to think of hue as the variant of a specific color measured in increments, much like you see in Photoshop.
Value can be thought of as the Level tool in Photoshop. Slight increments of white are added to Continue reading »
