What Is Color Theory?
Color Theory is made of rules and guidelines that designers (and bakers!) use to create beautiful color schemes. In short, it’s the foundation that visual art is built around. Try naming some visual art examples with your kids; some of our favorites are paintings, drawings and, of course, baking!
The Color Wheel was invented to be a visual representation of color theory. In other words, it’s a tool that would allow you to quickly look at it and understand colors’ relationships to one another. When looking at the Color Wheel, colors that are across from each other are called Complementary Colors. Let’s take yellow and purple, for example. When next to each other, they are stunning, but they cancel each other out and create a gray hue when mixed.
What Does the Color Wheel Represent?
The Color Wheel represents three types of colors: primary, secondary and tertiary. Red, yellow and blue are the base for all colors and are called primary colors. Our secondary colors are made by mixing two primary colors together. For example, yellow and blue form the color green! Two secondary colors, when combined, create a tertiary color. So, what’s an example of a tertiary color? That would be if we mixed purple and green together.
What Role Does Color Theory Play in Baking?
In short, everything! Color Theory helps us bakers make colorful frosting for our cakes, pick out complementary frosting and even create grey frosting by mixing two complementary colors.
It also helps with shading and tinting. For example, we know we can mix blue and white to create a lighter shade of blue, or adding black to colors will make them darker.