Working with colour - part 3

Describing Colour

• Hue of colour - the surface of how the colour appears.
• Tonality - underlying characteristics of the colour.

Understanding the Effect of Tonality

If you use a bright yellow colour, I would say the tonality is not going to be helpful within the rest of your decorating scheme.

However, if you introduce an underlying earth pigment, it will speak much more succinctly with the other elements and materials in your room and will feel a lot calmer.

Similarly, a bright green is quite strong and a challenging colour to decorate with.

Instead, a deep earthy green that contains a touch of raw umber is much more grounding, will be easier on the eye and create a more comfortable room.

As well as practical considerations, there are other factors at play when decorating with colour.

Beginning to Explore Tonality

While tonality is crucial, colour remains a choice. You may desire to paint your dining room red, in which case you would then explore the spectrum of reds to find the correct tonality.

Whether you pick out one room to decorate at a time, or attempt the whole house concurrently, it's helpful to consider colours in relation to each other. Assess the colours that already exist in the materials or furniture, and think of your paint colour will relate to those.

No matter how many colours you combine, it is the underlying tonality that will help the palette to feel harmonious and balanced.

Don't Be Judgemental About Colour

Try to forget any preconceived notions you have of certain colours because, as we've discussed, adjusting the tonality can hugely impact the experience of it within a room. You may have previously disregarded pink, but it can actually be a beautifully earthy addition to a scheme and carries a historical prevalence too thanks to the wide availability of red ochre in the past.

Metamerism

Colour, of course, requires light and as a result, light has a huge impact on the way we experience and see colour. Natural light will fall in different places within a room at different times of the day, and this will impact the look of the paint colour. As well as natural light, artificial light will also adjust the appearance of colours.

To measure light, we use the Kelvin temperature chart. Daylight is around 6000 Kelvin, whereas a candle will offer around 1000 Kelvin. It is generally accepted that around 2800 Kelvin will show you the truest sense of the colour you have chosen.

No one room has a constant level or temperature of light, and so you will find that the appearance of colour will vary throughout the day - understood through the phenomenon of Metamerism.

While this is a fact of life, I have discovered that if you use a paint with just a single pigment, it's far more likely to change colour dramatically than if you make a colour with numerous pigments.

Ultimately, it's important to check your colour choices under the light that your room will most often be seen in to determine how the colour will appear in situ.

I recommend instead of painting a section of the wall, paint a piece of card instead so that you can move around to different areas where the light is stronger or weaker. I would also consider the colour next to furniture, fabric and wallpaper to see how it interacts with them too.

How I Select Colour

1. I will always start by looking at the room itself, taking into account the style in which it has been built and the architectural details that exist within it.
2. The aspect of the room is important, and you should work out where and when the natural light falls in the room.
3. Next, I will determine what sort of atmosphere I want to create based on how the room will be used and when.

Your Assignment

Using the framework of how I select colour, list all of the elements of your space that will feed into and impact your choice of colour. Then, over the page, you can then begin to think of the colour choices you might make as a result - as well as colour, consider the underlying tones you should include too.