Because color is a sensational response, there can be no true objectivity in the field.

Color is an intimately subjective experience and the resources found here are for you to strengthen your creative potential of color.

Your interest in color can be borne in two ways: from the constructive aspect of color, how it functions in a variety of relationships; or it can relate to the expressive aspect of color, how it may be used as an emotionally expressive vehicle for symbolic imagery. Color sensations or the subjective dimensional qualities of color are basically:

• Hue
• Value
• Saturation

A color wheel is a two-dimensional model of color relationships that deal with hues.

Each hue has individual characteristics and groups of categories of colors share familiar effects. There are three primary hues: red, blue and yellow.

Each represents different visual qualities that are fundamental. Yellow is the color considered closest to light and warmth; red the most emotional and active while blue is passive and soft. Yellow and red tend to expand, blue to contract. In association with each other they may take new meanings.

Saturation, also known as chroma or intensity, is the measure of the purity and brightness, or grayness, of a color.

A high saturated color will appear almost as pure as transparent gemstones with light passing through them. On the contrary, colors with low saturation appear dull, as if thin layers of grayed paint had been painted on top of purer hues.

Less saturated colors reach toward neutrality of color and are subtle and restful. The more intense or saturated colors are highly charged with expression and emotion. Your results in the choice of saturated or neutralized colors are based entirely on intention. Prejudice toward colors can prevent us from making our own discoveries. For example, in every day speech we use color names in ways that reflect stereotypical ideas and fixed emotional connotations.

Red is typically associated with anger and passion; blue and green with coolness and calm. Some of these associations probably come from common experiences with our environment. We see fire or angry faces as red so we link the color with warmth and passion. We see skies blue and therefore tend to link blue with seeming coolness and serenity. However, all these color associations are not homogenous.

Don’t limit yourself to the standard color associations.

Avoid overlooking other exciting possibilities of presenting color, for example, blue in a passionate emotional design or red in a serene setting. Use the color wheel to the full extent.

Color not only has universally shared meaning through experience, it also has separate worth informationally through symbolically attached meaning.

In addition to the highly negotiable color meaning, each of us has our own subjective color preferences. You choose your personal color statements and settings.

However, there is little analytical concern about what methods or motivation we use to arrive at our own choices in terms of the meaning and effect of color.

What are your color choices?

We all tell a great deal to the world when we make our color choices. Your goal is to dominate the total impact of all three characteristics shown above operating together.

That’s making the color wheel work for your jewelry design.

How?

By judging the relationship between color characteristics using the color wheel, learn how to use colors in stimulating combinations using the complementary, secondary and tertiary color schemes found here.

Go from Basic Color Wheel back to Color Theory

References used in this section: Ittens (1994); Zelanski and Fisher (1996); De Sausmarez (1983)