Hue, Value, and Chroma:

Using Color Theory to Enhance Your Home Decor

The three most important things to accurate color mixing are hue, value, and chroma.  Because colors are the basic elements of painting it’s crucial to gain an intimate knowledge of the personalities of the colors you use.

Paint Colors Defined: Hue

The easiest way to understand hue is that it’s artspeak for the actual color of the pigment or object.   When paint manufacturers give the paint colors it becomes more complicated though because the word hue is used to indicate that a color is not made from pigments that were originally used for that paint, but modern equivalents that are either cheaper or more lightfast.  Hue is important in color mixing because it indicates the color that you first choose for.

Choosing Paint Colors: Value

Without any consideration for its hue – value, AKA “tone”, is a measure of how light or dark a color is.  The issue with a color’s value is that how light or dark is seems it’s also influenced by what is going on around it.  What can seem lighter can appear darker next to even lighter tones.

House Painting Colors: Chroma

Exterior and interior house painting is an opportunity to completely enhance and transform the environment of your home. Chroma or “saturation” of color is a measure of how intense it is.  Chroma is more of a pure, bright color in comparison with the same color diluted by white, black, gray or thinned out by glaze. Different variations therefore can then be produced by the amounts of the diluting agent.  With chroma you use how intense or pure the hue is while with value you don’t consider hue but just light and dark.

Painting your House while Implementing Color Theory

Color theories are the necessity of our daily life because everything that we buy is colorful and thus, we always tend to match the type of color of the object with the surroundings, where it would be placed. Even while dressing, we tend to wear contrasting colors, so that they tend to be attractive to anyone passing by. As far as artists or painters are concerned, they would find it really easy to blend the colors and obtain the right shades in no time, if only they had the idea of color theories. Color theories are important to the painters, not just for blending, but also for bringing life into their pieces of art.

Nowadays, it would be very wrong for us to say that color theories are restricted to the profession of painting only, because physicists have to do a great deal of work with the light spectrum; this spectrum involves all the colors that combine together to form white light. To get a grasp of this technology and concept one must have an adept knowledge of color theories and only then can one proceed along any further. Color theory can even be applied to choosing colors when you stain your deck. Nevertheless, painters must have a good knowledge of color theories to get the attention of the viewers and leave a lasting impact in their minds.

For more information on color theories contact a local interior decorator or house painting service.