A Color Study ~ Inspired by Emerald

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Hello everyone!  Kim here today with one of my favorite kind of posts… color inspiration!  It’s a new year again, so it’s time for a look at Pantone’s Color of the Year for 2013!!  In the past we’ve been inspired by Turquoise and Tangerine.  This year… say hello to Emerald!!

Now I have to say that when I saw what this year’s color was, I was really excited to scrap with it.  And I gave some thought to what might be fun to do with Emerald that would be a little different.  Here’s where my wandering thoughts led me…

The color wheel.  What is a color wheel, you ask?  The basic color wheel is made up of twelve colors.  There are the three Primary colors: red, yellow and blue, which when mixed together in different ways make up all the other colors on the wheel.  Then there are three Secondary colors: orange, violet and green.  Remember learning about those as a child?  Yellow and blue make green.  Red and yellow make orange.  Blue and red make violet.  Finally you mix a Primary and Secondary color to get the six Tertiary colors.  But really just taking a look at the color wheel makes a lot more sense!  Here is one example.

Now my whole reason for talking about the color wheel is to show you a way you can develop a color palette for a layout.  We’re going to look at color schemes that come from the color wheel and make those the inspiration for our layouts.  We’ll use blue-green as the starting point because Pantone’s Emerald is a blue-green.  Ready to see our color schemes??  Here we go!

Our first color scheme uses Complementary Colors.  These are colors that are directly opposite each other on the color wheel.  So for us today, we’re going to use blue-green and red-orange.

Complementary colors give maximum contrast.  This is because they don’t share any of the same colors.  For example, yellow and violet are complementary and violet is made up of red and blue (and not yellow).  Complementary schemes have an energetic feel.  Sometimes it can be a bit tricky to find the right balance though.  Here is what I did using Emerald and its complementary color.

Up next we’re going to look at an Analogous Color scheme.  Analogous colors are any three that are side by side on the color wheel.  Today we’ll use green, blue-green and blue.

Analogous color schemes are pleasing to the eye and are supposed to be able to create different moods.  As I read about this type of scheme, it was usually recommended to let one color be the dominant color while the other two colors add depth.  I’m not sure if I got that 100% right in this one, but here’s my analogous layout!

Our last color scheme for today uses Triadic Colors.  These colors are equidistant from each other on the color wheel (they make an equilateral triangle).  Our triadic colors are blue-green, red-violet, and yellow-orange.

Triadic colors give variety to a color palette because they aren’t close to each other on the color wheel.  Some of the color schemes could come off as a bit gaudy, but used the right way, they have interesting impact.  Here’s my take on this color scheme.

I asked the Shabby Team if they’d like to try these color schemes out themselves, and they have more inspiration to share with you!!

What I love most about this post is that we started with one color, Emerald, and the layouts that were created are all so different!  Thank you everyone for all these beautiful layouts!  If you want to see theirs in more detail, check out the gallery, where they will be uploaded soon.

Here’s where I usually say “that’s all for today”, but instead I must sign off a bit more permanently.  This is my last post before the team blog posts end, and I have so enjoyed my time here and sharing a love of scrapping with all of you.  Thanks for being such a great community of scrappers!  I’ll see you in the gallery!!  Bye bye!

KimInspiration, Uncategorized 11 Comments