How human beings perceive and understand color is a vast topic worthy of a book-length treatise. However, for our purposes in the context of choosing colors for the exterior painting of a home, it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of color theory and some of the terms you’re likely to encounter when researching what kind of color schemes or palettes work together.
The Color Wheel and Basic Color Theory
Sir Isaac Newton is credited with inventing the first color wheel after he had discovered white light was comprised of the combination of all colors of the spectrum. While our understanding of light and color has grown significantly since Newton, the color wheel Newton first developed is still a useful tool examples of which can readily be found via a Google search (see image accompanying this post).
The color wheel shows the 12 basic colors and their relationships to each other. We use certain terms to identify these colors and their relationships. First, we identify and label the primary colors.
What are the Primary Colors?
For colors perceived by light reflected off a surface (known as subtractive color), the primary colors are yellow, red, and blue. For colors perceived by light viewed directly from a light source like a television screen or computer monitor (known as additive color), the primary colors are designated as red, green, and blue. In essence, all of the other colors on the color wheel can be created by mixing the primary colors together.
What are the Secondary Colors?
The secondary colors are the colors that result when mixing equal proportions of two primary colors: yellow and blue yields green; blue and red yields purple; red and yellow yields orange.
What are Tertiary Colors?
The tertiary colors are created by combining secondary colors with primary colors. Hence, mixing orange with yellow yields yellow-orange. Mixing orange with red yields red-orange and so on to fill out the remainder of the color wheel.
What are Complementary Colors?
Complementary colors are the colors that lie directly across the color wheel from each other (e.g., blue/orange, yellow/purple, red/green, yellow-orange/blue-purple, etc.). Complementary colors are colors that work in tandem together forming a pleasing relationship to the eye.
What are Analogous Colors?
Analogous colors are the colors adjacent on either side of a chosen color on the color wheel. Yellow-orange, orange, and red-orange are examples of analogous colors. Used in an exterior paint scheme, analogous colors will harmonize with each other, although there will be less contrast between the colors.
In a subsequent post we will delve a bit deeper into color theory and discuss the terms saturation, chroma, and hue and how they all factor in to selecting a color palette for your home’s exterior.