Saturday afternoon, Memorial weekend, I decided to visit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. There I came across some paintings by abstract artist Josef Albers from a series he called Homage to the Square. The paintings are simple…just concentric squares in brilliant mono-chromatic or contrasting colors. I love minimalist artwork, so these paintings really caught my eye. I went home and Wikipedia’d the artist and read about his work on the study of color theory. Basically the theory states that colors interact with their surroundings and are ever-changing. This means one shade of green, when set against yellow will look entirely different from the exact shade of green set against blue. Of course I thought about how this applies to weddings.
You can spend forever picking out the exact shade of Kelly green or seafoam or poppy for your bridesmaids dresses, table runners and wedding favors but try to remember that these colors will take on a life of their own on your wedding day. So stop obsessing and just choose a color you like and try to picture it against the setting of your wedding. Will it be outdoors? Lots of grass, a clear blue sky or a sandy beach? Or will it be mood lighting, dramatic velvet curtains and dark wood furniture? If you go with a color that compliments your surroundings and then build on that with tonal layers or contrasting details you will see that you don’t need PMS colors, RGB values, CMYK or any other letters they throw at you to create a classy palette perfect for you.