Knowing and understanding color is a basic fundamental necessary for successfully decorating your home. It's important to be able to recognize the hue, clarity, and shade of each color you consider so that you can choose wisely and incorporate them effectively in your home's color scheme. You can't just go by color names, since every designer, fabric manufacturer, paint store, and retailer uses their own names and shades. Remember, one man's lilac is another man's heather. (*smile*)

The most important aspect of color to consider is hue or tint. The color wheel is a useful tool to help organize the millions of hues out there.

Imagine a circle, divided into six pie slices. Each slice is for one of the six basic colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. It is a rainbow in a circle. Now take away the dividing lines between each color, and let them blend together... you now have red-oranges, orange-yellows, yellow-greens, etc. and so forth all the way around the circle to purple-reds.

Every color on earth belongs somewhere on this wheel. And every color can be muted with black, or have its shade lightened with white. Let's study it.

Red, yellow, and blue are known as primary colors. By combining the right amounts of each, every other color on the wheel is created. Orange, green, and purple are known as secondary colors - they are really composed of the two colors on either side. So red and yellow make orange colors, yellow and blue make green colors, and blue and red make purple colors.

You must learn to see 'into' colors so that you have a general idea where on the color wheel it belongs, and therefore HOW MUCH of each primary color is in it. This is called the color's hue or tint. Let's take green for an example. Pure green - grass green, as I call it - is exactly half way between yellow and blue. It is equal parts blue and yellow, so neither primary color really is noticeable. They cancel each other out. But as soon as more yellow is added, it begins to look like a yellowish green, like olive green, khaki green, and apple green. But if more blue is added, then it brings the color the other way around the color wheel - giving us colors like sea green, teal, and aqua green. Realize that we are not talking yet about how dark, light, bright, or muted a color is, but rather which colors contribute to its tint.

It is important to be able to recognize this when you're trying to match colors - this is why green is not just green, and why two separate greens may clash.

Clarity and shade adjust and modify the hue of a color, and are just as important to understand. They are separate, but they often work together. A color's shade is simply how light or dark it is, while the clarity of a color is how clear or muted the color is. Any hue from the color wheel can be lightened with white to make it paler, and/or it can be muted with black or grey (which is really both black and white) to mute it. Neither one of these factors changes the ratio of primary colors in the hue, it simply adds white and/or black.

This time let's take pink for our example. Fuchsia is a color that most of us are familiar with. It's mostly red, with just a hint of blue. Let's say that this particular hue is 90% red and 10% blue. We can now take that hue and change its clarity by adding black to darken and mute it to a wine color. We can instead keep its clarity, but lighten the shade by adding white to get a pale clear pink. Or we can both mute it and lighten it by adding both black and white to get a soft mauve. Can you see the difference? All four 'colors': fuchsia, wine, pink, and mauve contain the same red:blue ratio of 90% and 10%, so they are the same hue and belong at the same place on the color wheel. But each has a different clarity and shade.

These are the basics of color. When you understand these fundamentals, and have learned to see 'into' colors, you gain the power to distinguish between them accurately in a knowledgeable manner.

Have fun!