Color is a really cool thing. It's the most emotional of all design elements.... and it's one of the cheapest. Compare the cost of a few gallons to paint to the cost of a new sofa, new side table, new accessories or new window treatments.
Color is an amazing tool that can do many things including: make a small room feel larger, make a large room feel smaller, make a room cozier, make a dark room lighter, create a mood in an entire home and link rooms within a home.
To understand color and the role it plays in Interior Design, let's start with the basics.... the Standard Color-Wheel Theory. This theory is based on three primary colors (technically, we should call them hues), yellow, red and blue which are placed equidistant on a color wheel.
Between the primary hues are secondary hues: red plus yellow makes orange, yellow plus blue makes green and blue plus red makes violet. Next comes intermediate hues which are created when we mix a primary hue with a secondary hue. Red plus orange gives us red-orange, and yellow plus orange gives us yellow-orange (notice that the primary color is always listed first). This continues around the color wheel for the other intermediate hues, and we end up with 12 colors. These 12 colors can be mixed in various amounts along with white and black to give us an unlimited number of hues.
If we draw a line across the circle cutting it in half starting between the red and red-violet and extending to the other side between green and yellow-green we've divided the circle into warm and cool colors. The colors on the red and yellow side are considered warm hues and the colors on the blue side are considered cool hues.
