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Color Coordinate Your Scrapbook Page For Maximum Impact
By Genie Balfour

A visitor to my website recently asked how to color coordinate your scrapbook albums page. A great question – since not everyone feels confident about the design aspects of scrapbooking. Of course its your use of colors which generates much of the visual impact of your page, so just how can you maximise the impact of your scrapbook page layout designs?

How to Choose Color Schemes that Work?

I stumbled across the concept of a Color Wheel a few years ago, and I’ve been using this kind of tool every since. Anyone who has studied Art will be familiar with this, but for those of you who are not, let me explain…

The Color Wheel is a circular representation of the color spectrum, in order to demonstrate how the various hues relate to each other – how they can complement, contrast, or conflict each other.

You may come across a few different types. For example:

* a six-segment wheel depicts the primary (red, yellow, blue) and secondary (orange, green, violet) colors.
* a 12-segment wheel also includes tertiary colors (referring to intermediate tones that link pairs of primaries with one of their secondaries).

Since some of these terms may not be familiar, so here’s a jargon-buster:

Primary: red, yellow, blue
Secondary: orange, green, violet, respectively
Terciary: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, red-violet.
Tertiary colors are combinations of primary and secondary colors. The primary name is placed first to indicate an dominance of the primary over the secondary color.

Complementary: these are located opposite each other on the wheel.

* Mix them, and the result is gray;
* Place them side by side, and they enhance each other.

Analogous: located next to each other in the wheel.

* Used together, the result is visual harmony.

The color wheel illustrates several aspects of color theory, providing a basis for artists to make color choices to suit their purpose. Artists and designers use the color wheel as a guide in choosing colors to mix, or combine.

Since I first came across the color wheel, it seems online color matching tools have become readily available. One I noticed recently is from Scrapbook.com, who have an online photo matching service, with a color wheel you can use free of charge – and no need to sign up either… A great help for digital and traditional scrappers alike to color coordinate your scrapbook page!

Genie Balfour
A paper crafter and scrapbooker for many years, Genie is well-versed in the ins and outs of paper and digital scrapbooking. As the founder of the popular website ScrapbookingGems.com, she writes regularly on paper and digital scrapbooking topics.

Discover how Genie designs elegant color-coordinated Digital Scrapbook Page layouts, or click here to save yourself time and check out her digital scrapbook templates.

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