Intensity of Color - Muting Hues
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When you look at a pure color… a pure red… it is at it’s most intense. The intensity of color is the purity of color… 100% saturation. Nothing has been added to the hue to mute or dull it in anyway.
To mute a color you would add the color’s complement to it. A color’s complement is a neutralizer.
What is the complement? It is the color that is completely opposite the color on the color wheel. Let’s look at this basic color wheel. Now, let’s work with red for now. What color is opposite red on the color wheel?
Right! Green. So, green is red’s complementary color.
When you add a drop of green to red you mute red… it will be less intense than the pure red. Keep adding green to red and watch how the red becomes more and more muted. Eventually it will become a completely neutral brown.
What colors make brown?
By mixing even amounts of red and green (2 complementary colors) you achieve brown.
The same theory applies for green as well. When you add red to green, you mute green.
So, what about the other colors in the color wheel?
The same color theory applies to any hue on the color wheel.
To mute a color add the color’s complement.
Yellow’s complementary color is… purple
Blue’s complementary color is… orange.
