Hi, everyone. It's Justine and today's video is about colour.
First I'd like to tackle the basics of colour theory, the combinations that the human eye likes and
dislikes. And then I teach you how to use the learnings, either when you create a collection, if you're a designer or on a very pragmatic
day to day basis, when you put your outfit together in the morning, because it matters there as well.
If you already know what triad or an analogous palette mean, you can just skip to the second part of the video.
Otherwise stay here with me. I'll be using a colour wheel, which some of you might know already from my channel on other videos.
And I'll guide you through the technical terms to start with. We start with the basics.
Here’s my colour wheel. First we have the three primary colours: blue, yellow and red.
I get secondary colours by mixing
two primary colours together.
If I mix yellow and blue, I get green. If I mix blue and red, I get purple.
If I mix yellow and red, I get orange. So I have three primary colours and three secondary colours.
Tertiary colours are made by using the primary and a secondary.
If I mix yellow and green, I get yellow-green.
I mix blue and purple, I get blue-purple. If I mix red and orange, I get red-orange.
Primary, secondary, tertiary. Until now it's easy, in the end
we have all the colours on this basic colour wheel. Now I'd like to split my colour wheel into two halves
One half
reds, oranges, yellows are the warm colours.
The other half: greens, blues and purples are the cool colours. Now each colour on this wheel is called a hue.
H-U-E.
To each colour I can add white to make it a tint,
black to make it a shade or gray to make it a tone of itself. And I happen to have it here
on this super practical
pocket wheel.
For instance, if to yellow I add white, I get this which is a tint, it's on there. If I add
black, I get this shade of yellow.
And if I add gray, I get this tone of yellow: tint, shade, tone.
You can do the same for each of the colours and you get a much broader colour palette already. A monochromatic palette
stays within one hue and only adds white, black and gray. This is one monochromatic palette
based on the one hue that is red. I could also add the first neighbour, in this case red-violet
and build an analogous palette with the red,
purple and their respective tints, shades and tones. The eight colours in this part here
build an analogous palette and it's still very easy on the eye.
Let's go back to the other side.The complementary colour is made
by taking one primary colour, for instance blue, and its absolute opposite on the wheel, here orange.
Orange is made out of the two colours that
blue doesn't have, right? So blue and orange are complementary.
That, the I don't like.
So to twist that, you should replace orange by something that’s here
or there. And it would work better.
The triad it is even worse, because instead of taking two colours, you’re taking three that don't belong together.
For blue, you would take yellow and red, evenly spaced out on the wheel.
So that's a triad. You could also say blue-green, yellow-orange and red-violet, it’s less obvious
but it's a triad it as well, evenly spaced out. This split complement of blue is
the colour left and right of its complementary colour. So in this case it's yellow-orange and
red-orange. Those two build a kind of a Y on the colour wheel, that’s a split complement.
It’s not
super conservative, okay, it's not so easy on the eye.
But it's already better than a pure complementary combination, because at least you have two colours here that
kind of fitting together and only the blue is really contrasting. Then a tetrad is made of
two pairs of complements, your yellow-orange, blue-violet, plus yellow and violet.
I get those four colours.
That's called the tetrad. And if you pick a tetrad that fills a perfect square, for instance, yellow, red-orange,
violet and blue-green, you see they’re equally spaced out on the wheel,
they build the perfect square, well then they’re called the square palette. How are these colours in fashion?
First I'd like to get back to the question of colour temperature. Warm colours in general will be louder, more energetic, more dynamic.
Maybe also a bit more aggressive. And then the cold colours: blue, green, purple
will be maybe a bit more quiet, but also very elegant. Maybe a bit darker.
Ideally when you design a collection or when you design your wardrobe, your closet choice, you wanna
make sure of both, because only cold colours would be very quiet and only warm colours would be too loud.
Also, if you're designing a collection
definitely you want cold and warm to cater for different tastes of a wide range of potential consumers. However,
using consistently only warm or only cold colours
can contribute to define the style of your brand?
Lanvin often uses dark blues and generally
cold colours and shades. It is a very elegant classic brand and that’s the image you have of them. And then you have Jeremy Scotts,
that's Moschino, doing exactly the opposite.
He mixes up bright colours, complementary colours, in your face colours.
So the colour identity, so to say, of a brand is essential, because people,
especially visual people,
will remember the colour universe of a collection
longer than the details of the clothes. Next question: how to modify colours to build a harmonious
colour palette? Monochromatic in analogous paletts look very harmonious to the eye.
You're actually taking colours that are already close to each other already
and you're only adding white, black and gray. So it really doesn't
change the essence of the colour itself, easy one.
As soon as you stop crossing from one side on the colour wheel to the other side, no matter where you are
you're going to start having clashes and the human eye does not like that. Some like it this way.
But if you want to count down the combination of two
complementary colours for instance, you can add black or white to one of the two colours,
to make it a shade or a tint on itself, and then it’s already easier on the eye.
Let's keep the example of the complementary colours on the wheel, no matter where you take them, but they are completely opposite.
You can mute one of the two colours.
For example this one, by adding a bit of the complementary one
into it. That's called muting a colour.
Then, although the two colours are actually completely opposite,
they now both contain a bit of the same thing and it's better for the eye.
Next thing: you can also change the proportions of each of the colours in the outfit.
One colour will be dominant while the others will be just accents.
Accent colours.
And of course you can do the same thing in a print: modify the proportions.
In general, using complementary colours in equal proportions will always look like it's too much, too loud.
But if you change the proportions on your print or on your outfit, then it's gonna look okay for the eye
and it's even going to look modern, dynamic, sportswear like.
American brands use that a lot. I hope this video answer your main questions about colour, colour theory.
What works, what doesn't and why. Thumbs up if you learned something?
Thank you so much. To learn about how to choose colours from a moodboard, this video here and
it’s fashion month.
So if you want to know how to critique and review a fashion show this video is for you,
That’s the one from last week. I see you next Sunday for a new video and until then, take care. Bye!