Oh and for the answer to ‘what 3 colors make brown’ we have
Understanding color theory: the color wheel and finding complementary colors
Luis Gonzalez, senior brand designer at InVision, has an exercise for you: Think about the color red. What comes to mind? Perhaps feelings like anger, passion, energy simmer to the surface. Or maybe visions of flushed cheeks, a cherry lipstick shade, a stop sign, blood, or a heart float through your head.
While those might not have been the exact thoughts and feelings red evoked in you, it’s likely you associated the color with certain emotions, ideas, and objects. You’re not alone: This is a universal human experience—and it’s a powerful tool you can use as a designer. Understanding that color choice goes beyond personal preferences can help you not only improve a product’s usability—but even psychologically impact your users.
In order to unleash the power of color, you first have to start by understanding color theory, the color wheel, how to use complementary colors to create an impactful color scheme, and the psychological effects of those colors. Whether you’re first diving into the topic (or are just looking for a refresher), here’s how to begin:
Understanding color theory
Color theory can help designers determine which colors look good together. Color theory goes beyond just “eyeing” color combinations, though, which is where the science part comes in.
At the heart of color theory is the color wheel, which was created in the late 17th century by Sir Isaac Newton. Best known for his physics breakthroughs, Newton mapped the color spectrum into a circle.
Today, the color wheel can help artists and designers find harmonious color combinations based on the geometric relationships represented on the color wheel. As an example, a triadic color scheme involves three evenly-spaced colors on the color wheel and that will yield a bold combination. Meanwhile, a tetradic color scheme involves four colors evenly spaced out on the color wheel, and can work if you want to use a dominant color with supporting accent colors.
Designers looking to experiment with colors can use color picker extensions, use color palette generators like Muzli’s, or even consult Pinterest boards, Gonzalez says.
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“My biggest recommendation would be go back to the basics and look at a color wheel,” he says.
His recommended reading? Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, an art education book breaking down complex color theory principles.
Color wheel
The color wheel is a visual representation of colors, with hues arranged according to wavelength. Color wheels allow color relationships to be represented geometrically, and show the relationship between primary colors, secondary colors and tertiary colors.
In the traditional RYB color wheel, the primary colors are red, yellow and blue. You can create secondary colors—orange, green, and purple—by mixing primary colors. Red and yellow create orange. Yellow and blue creates green. Red and blue creates purple. You remember this from elementary school, right?
Then, mixing secondary colors and primary colors creates tertiary colors.
Many different iterations of the color wheel exist, but many involving these three relationship types show a dozen colors.
What is the color brown?
Now have you ever really thought about the color brown? To be honest until a couple of years ago I hadn’t given it much thought. I just really thought of it as another color. We have reds, yellows, blues, greens, purples etc and I tucked it in with all of those. But it’s not like those colors. We tend to think of it as a separate color. Personally I almost never find myself mixing brown paint. My color palette always contains burnt sienna (a close second behind ultramarine blue) which I use a lot. However, I very often use burnt sienna to mix colors and don’t use it straight from the tube. But back to our browns – if we’re mixing brown paint we need to know exactly what brown is before we can create it!
So let’s take a look at our color wheel. Around the outside we have all our different colors (or hues). Where is brown? Hmmm it’s not there. But the color wheel has all of the colors so it must be there somewhere.
If we take a closer look at our color wheel all of the colors are very saturated. They’re the brightest we can get to in paint. We know that brown isn’t bright so let’s redraw our color wheel and darken each of the colors on the outside.
Aha! So there are our brown colors! And if we place the wheels together which color is it the darker version of?
Yup. That looks brown. And if we put it next to our trusty burnt sienna they look almost identical. Now in practice I would never actually mix brown this way. If I needed a brown the color of burnt sienna I would get out some burnt sienna. But it’s handy to know that it can be done.
Red and Yellow and Black make Brown
Now if orange and black make brown can we mix brown with red, yellow and black? We know red and yellow make orange and orange and black make brown so will this work? Let’s try it out.
Yes indeedy it works. Good to know but it’s a pretty roundabout way of mixing so probably not too useful in real life.
Are there any other ways to mix brown? Let’s go back to our color wheel and look again.
Join Colors Across the Color Wheel to Find Out What They Make
A good rule of thumb with color mixing is that if you have two paint colors around the outside or your color wheel and draw a line between them you’ll end up with the color somewhere along that line. It’s not a hard and fast rule as pigments sometimes interact differently when they mix together but it’s a rough guide.
So looking at the color wheel we should be able to mix brown by picking two colors across from each other that cross through the brown section. The first one we’re going to try is red + yellow + blue. We know red and yellow make orange and if we join orange and blue the line goes through the brown wedge. This is the ‘classic’ recipe for brown so we’re pretty sure it’s going to work and the color wheel also says this. How well does it work in practice?
