How to choose a good color palette

Colors are beautiful. The one who can not feel color made impressions, looses a lot. The colors and their internal relationships are very sensitive, and to find ones that look great together are very hard task to accomplish and only experienced artist can do that. Or maybe not? Today we will look through some of main color concepts which will let you find some nice color pairs or trios.

One thing that’s important to note is that one color alone is boring, and is not making an effect. The magic relies in their relationships.

You should start creating your palette by choosing two or three base colors from color wheel. Choosing more will lead in chaos. Choosing only one usually will be too boring. Of course there are cases, where using monotone is preferred, especially if you want to create a very relaxing atmosphere.

Here are two colors i like.

Here is online color wheel you can try out. If two colors are used as base, than it is a good idea to pick complimentary colors. Complimentary colors are colors that reside directly opposite to each other in color wheel. For example blue and yellow would be complimentary colors. If three colors are used, then try to pick them so that there are 120 degrees between each of them. Doing so will ensure that colors play with each other more intense.

So for example let’s assume we’ve picked two colors. This means that there will be two main actors in our play. Just like in movies. There is always a good, and bad, beautiful and ugly. The contrast is what makes movie interesting, right? Same principle stays true with colors. When base colors are picked the next thing to do is create variations of them, by adjusting saturation and brightness. Variations will allow separate information that is important, from background. Usually more saturation is used for things you want observer to first notice.

Again worth to mention here is that, changing one color will actually change all of them. Because colors are relative. Just like one amateurish and clumsy actor in movie with proffesionals can ruin whole movie charm, same can be said about one wrongly choosed color.

There is a lot more to write about colors of course, but I just want to point out some excelent resources. Check out this Lynda video tutorial about colors if you are interested more in depth about color theory, or visit this colourlovers site for ready-to-use color palletes. It should be nice place to get some inspiration.

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