Through my personal social media platforms people often ask me how do you know what colors go together and tell me they don’t tend to go outside of the basic color palettes because they don’t know how to quite match colors of their look for it to come out good.

I am more then confident that my followers or those that have contacted me are not the only ones that face this problem. So today I wanted to give some brief foundation tips on how to understand colors and how they compliment each other. And what a befitting word to use, “compliment” because one of the basic rules of coloring is actually called the rule or law of complimentary colors. You may say “What are those?”

Complimentary Colors are colors directly opposite each other in the color spectrum, such as red and green or blue and orange, that when combined in the right proportions, produce white light. And white light is considered the point of perfection which signifies great balance and blend.

When you look at a color on the color wheel and then go immediately across to the other side you will find the perfect complimenting color.

Furthermore in understanding the graph pictured above you see that you have 2 things labeled: Primary, Secondary & Tertiary. (photo: brandigirlblog.com)

PRIMARY COLORS –  Any of a group of colors from which all other colors can be obtained by mixing. The three primary colors can be looked to as the parents in the family of colors. The pure Yellow, pure Red, and pure Blue are the only hues that can’t be created by mixing any other colors together, but yet they help to make up any other colors you have ever known or seen.

SECONDARY COLORS – which are thought to be the children of the primary colors are created when you combine any two of the pure primary colors.

TERTIARY COLORS – which are thought to the the grandchildren of primary colors are 6 new mixtures created when you mix a Primary and its nearest Secondary on the basic color wheel

For example:

Yellow + Orange = YELLOW-ORANGE

Red + Orange = RED-ORANGE

Red + Violet = RED-VIOLET

Blue + Violet = BLUE-VIOLET

Blue + Green = BLUE-GREEN

Yellow + Green = YELLOW-GREEN

These brief tips should help you to begin your color knowledge and give you some homework to work on to start looking at your closet and put some of these options together to see how they look.

Please take pictures and send to TheBillionBrand@gmail.com so I can see what you came up with and do a recap and feature you on a future article so that people can see how you have taken these foundation rules and applied to the advancement your fashion!

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