Color Dictionary

The magic of colors!

The colors are essential; to attract the eye, to stir the feelings, to inspire an atmosphere or a style.

Although it is commonly said that all tastes and colors are in nature, some do not necessarily unite as one would think. It is, therefore, necessary above all to impose specific "chromatic rules" and not to swear by his personal tastes. A small tour in the colors universe to find your way in the infinite colors called primary, tertiary and secondary ...

And do not forget that white and black are not colors!

Primary colors: the indispensable base

Red, yellow and blue are the primary colors that, like white, cannot be obtained by mixing other colors. By cons, mixing its three primary colors together, we get black. As their names indicate, they are called primary because they are the first links in the color chain: it is by mixing them that we can produce other colors.

Secondary colors: a productive marriage

The so-called secondary colors result from the mixing of two primary colors.

• We obtain as follows:
• Green: blue + yellow
• Orange: red + yellow
• Purple: red + blue

Tertiary colors: three in one

A tertiary color is called a neutral color which contains the three primary colors, without necessarily resulting from the direct mixing of these three colors. A tertiary color is obtained by mixing in equal parts a primary and a secondary color.

Example brown: Orange (secondary color resulting from red + yellow) + blue (primary color)

Complementary colors: chromatic opposites

These are opposite colors on the color circle.

• For example :
• yellow is complementary to purple
• red is complementary to green
• blue is complementary to orange

These create brilliant effects and allow to play on the contrasts. Conversely, if we mix these pairs, they cancel each other out and produce neutral colors (yellow + violet = brown ...).

Warm, cold and neutral colors: Say what?

Warm (or active) colors are the colors that swarm around orange tints such as red, pink, yellow, burgundy, brown, and their shades. They are reassuring, warm and spicy colors that "shrink" the perspective.

Cold colors (or passive) are used to give an impression of freshness, discretion, and serenity and give the illusion of enlarging the perspective. These tones are grouped around blue, green, purple and their shades.

We speak of neutral tone to qualify the shades from beige, white, black, gray and their nuances.