My Fascination with Colour

Growing up I was very shy, quiet child. I didn’t have any friends but I did have a big bag of marbles. I spent a lot of time with my marbles. Not playing games but matching colours. I would put the marbles into groups of two or more according to which colours, I thought, went together.

Perhaps those early years influenced my interest in colour. I love to go into a bead store and see all the different coloured beads. And I still like matching colours to see what goes well together. For me the fun of jewellery making is combining different colours.

Colour can influences the mood and feel of a piece of jewellery. Black and white is considered classic and will go with anything but tends to fade into the background and is is not as interesting to look at as a coloured piece of jewellery.

When working with colour combinations its useful to know some colour theory. Here I am talking about pigment colour, not light colour as the rules are very different.

There are three primary colours: red, blue and yellow. These three colours can not be made from other colours. Secondary colours are made by mixing two primary colours:

red + blue = purple

blue + yellow = green

red + yellow = orange.

Tertiary colours are made by combining a primary colour and a secondary colour. Then for each colour the tint and shade of a colour can be varied by adding either black or white. This results in an abundance of colours to chose from. So where do you start when combining colours?

In nature if you look at a field of flowers it looks good no matter what colours are in the field. So most colours go together. I tend to take the field of flowers approach, randomly choosing colours to see if I like the look.

However there are a number of colour schemes that can be used:

• Monochromatic refers to beads of one colour but in different shades of the colour.

• Analogous refers to harmonious colours, colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel.

• Complementary refers to contrasting colours, colours that are on the opposite sides of the colour wheel.

• Sometimes I find that the contrast can create too much tension. I prefer to use a split complementary. This refers to a base colour with two colours directly adjacent to the opposite or complement of the base colour. This creates a strong visual contrast but with less tension than a standard complementary.

• Triadic colours refers to colours that form an equilateral triangle on the colour wheel; one colour should be dominant.

• Tetradic refers to fours colours from the corners of a rectangle on the colour wheel. I find that this can look chaotic if the colours are not in the correct proportions.

• The choice of colour can give a warm or cool feeling to a jewellery piece. Warm colours refers to reds and oranges. These tend to be more dominant. Cool colours are blues and violets. These colours tend to be recessive.

There are seven design elements that a designer can use when creating a piece of jewellery. Since colour can often affect our emotions it is one of the most powerful tools that a designer has to communicate a mood, a message or a feeling.