Color theory is a large part of many, if not all, areas of our creative lives.  Whether you’re an artist, photographer, fashion designer, interior designer, florist or scrapbooker, the colors you choose have a major impact on your composition.

I love color!  I love combining colors that will complement a layout or design.  That works out great since we have an almost endless supply of color choices.  There are tens of millions of colors in our wonderful world but they all start from three root colors.  The three primary colors when mixing paint are red, yellow and blue.  These are the root colors that can be combined to create every other imaginable color.

When you combine any two of the primary colors the resulting colors are referred to as secondary colors.  Most people know you combine red + yellow to get orange, yellow + blue produces green and blue + red equals purple.  These are the secondary colors-orange, green and purple.

Combining a primary color with it’s closest secondary color produces six tertiary.  Think of it like a family tree.  The primary colors are the parents, their children the secondaries and the tertiary are grandchildren.  The tree just keeps expanding to produce an endless array.

Light passing through a prism mixes a little differently.  The transmitted primary colors are the color of the light source itself and are red, green and blue.  The mixing of these colors of light is how television mixes light to get colors.

Keep in mind it’s not necessary to understand everything there is to know about the two types of primaries because the end result is that using different colors in relation to one another is the same regardless of the set of primaries.

How you combine colors in your layout is where the magic begins. Some colors just seem to work better together to achieve a pleasing design.  A color wheel is a great reference tool to easily learn which combinations work best.  Use color theory to take you scrapbook layouts to a new level.