Color contrasts allow you to create schemes where the colors don't blend or merge but stand out from one another.
Contrasts of Tone
(Remember tint, lighter tone, and shade, darker tone). As this method sets light against dark, the most obvious scheme is black and white which shows the extremes of the light to dark scale.
If you remember, the yellow hue has a natural lightness, so combining yellow and black give a very good contrast. By the same token, blue or violet are the darkest natural hues, combining either of them with white will give you very good color contrasts as well.
Contrasts of tone are illustrated in this photo. The tints and shades used are not extreme, and so give a sense of relationship. To appreciate this, imagine if the bedcover were black and the floor and walls pure white instead of cream.
Primary Schemes
As it says, only primary colors used here. Because primary colors have the same intensity, these schemes can be quite 'hard' and 'in your face'. You'll often find modern schemes set these colors against a white background. This allows the scheme to work, with the white providing balance.
Complementary Schemes
You'll remember from the color wheel that complementary colors lie opposite one another. And the simplest way of using this type of scheme is to do just that - take two colors opposite one another!
One popular option is to use a 'cool' or 'receding' color for a large area of the room, and balance it with small quantities of a 'warm' or 'advancing' color. To get a more refined color contrasts effect you can modify both colors in tone and intensity. This is a often seen when one color is used to cover a sofa or chair, and the complementary color is used for the piping on the cushions.
Split Complementary Schemes
The idea here is to use three colors from the color wheel. So for example, take green; its complementary color is red/purple. But instead of using the exact complementary color, take two colors on either side of it - these are now the colors you use with the green. You could even go as far as violet and orange, and you can also vary their intensity to add more interest.
And that's all the theory we're going to be covering. Of course, there's far more to it than that. But if you've followed the explanations so far, you've progressed much further than most. This knowledge will enable you to understand why different interiors look the way they do.
The next few pages will show you a selection of color schemes and how to use them.
