I freaking love colours. I love the chemistry and physics behind colours. I love that ancient peoples painted with fruits, berries and dirt that were the colours they wanted to depict. I love that in our digital world there are so many options for colours. I once learned the HEX formula for colours because I thought it was so interesting!

There are so many facets to colours! I’m sure we all know the primary colours, then mix any 2 primaries to get a secondary colour (orange, green, and purple), and mix any secondary colour with a primary to get tertiary colours (chartreuse, amber, vermillion, magenta, violet, and teal)!

Then it gets really interesting:

• The primary colours are actually made up of a cool red and a warm red. This article from Just Paint describes warm and cool colours well.

• There are colour families: warm, primary and cool. When looking at the palettes above, it’s like you can feel the warmth from the top one! Primary colours are thought to be neutral and are generally used for the basis of all other colours. Cool colours invoke that wintry, icy feeling. Note how the HEX codes are similar in each family.

I think a colour’s family is one of the most important things to remember when creating a palette. If I’m trying to create a harmonious, calming sunset design, I don’t want to have a jarring difference in colours that will take me away from the feeling I’m trying to create. The same goes for painting a house.

Colours can also be grouped in other ways:

• Complementary Colours: They are opposite each other on the colour wheel (red & green, orange & blue, and yellow & purple)

Fun Fact: Scrubs are green to help doctors see better in the operating room because it is the exact opposite of red on the colour wheel!

• Analogous Colours: They are directly beside each other on the colour wheel.

• Triadic Colours: They make a triangle on the colour wheel.

Our digital world allows us to make colours into numbers so that we can translate what we see on our screens!

Primary Red	HEX #FF0000	R255 G0 B0
Primary Blue	HEX #0000FF	R0 G0 B255
Primary Yellow	HEX #FFFF00	R255 G255 B0

And all colours get built using special formulas based on this!

My favourite place to play with colours is the Coolors website. (Unsponsored, just absolutely love it and want to share.) It boggles my brain how someone has figured out how to make this amazing database of colours! The site (and app) allows me to create palettes, save them, export them to Procreate (and others), explore colours, find families, and copy the codes so that I don’t have to remember #437da5! It’s a colour lovers paradise!

I hope this has shed some light on some interesting things about colours, and maybe you’ll find Coolors as useful as I do! I could go on about colours for days, so let me know if you have any questions!

Take care,

Leslie