Colour study – grey

This week we’ll take a diversion from colour recipes to dive deep, deep, DEEP into a single colour – grey.  Are you thinking “not much to see here”? I hope I will change your mind.

Grey leaf (Bismark Palm)

Grey is, scientifically, a combination of pure white and pure black.  It is therefore achromatic (meaning no colour), colourless, free from colour, uncoloured, a non-colour.

12 step pure greys

I created a room in the 3d planner using only “grey” objects. Sounds easy – but looks horrible.

Many greys in a room

The problem is that in real life grey will often have a tinge of another colour – as shown here.

24 step chromatic greys

This is why the room looks so bad – the (red-orange) grey rug clashes with the (green) grey chair which clashes with the (yellow-orange) grey pouffe.  This seems quite obvious when the colours are shown beside each other like this, but is much harder to see when the objects are separated.

What is grey anyway?  It is a very unsaturated version of one of the colours on the colour wheel.  I could not find a colour wheel that showed the various versions of grey so I had to create my own.

Colour wheel with greys

I had fun looking for mydeco.com products covering the whole range of greys, arranged in colour wheel order because I’m a bit OCD like that.

Firstly, the “cool greys”. Violet and blue-violet (yes! that silver pouffe is a very light, very unsaturated violet!)

Violet greys

Then onto blue and blue-green…

Blue-green greys

About here we switch to the “warm greys” – yellow-green…

Warm yellow and green greys

Then yellow (yes yellow!) tones…

Yellow greys

Then orange and red-oranges.

Red and orange greys

Don’t believe me?  Visit my blog where I show these objects in their fully saturated colour.

So what about that leaf?  Green-grey.

Grey-green toned leaf

Let me know if you’re looking at you’re looking at clouds, bitumen/ashphalt and even grey cats with new eyes!