Examples Of Clean and Dirty Colour Combinations.

Mixing fabrics, hard  materials ( your counter/stone surfaces, laminate, hardwood, carpet), surfaces you’ve inherited when you purchase and new home, or older home,  your existing furniture, future purchases, factor in the natural light, and task lighting, and in-house lighting  can be a little tricky!  Today I really wanted to touch lightly on mixing dirty Colours and clean colours together.

Two Key Points About Mixing Colours:

1. In general, “clean” colours are when a color is clean, pure, bright or clear it means that it contains no gray/black in it, or very little. The clarity of a color has nothing to do with its lightness or darkness.  So both pale and deep colors can be clean.
2. “Dirty” colors can also be called muted, shaded, toned down. The reason is because they have been “muddied” with gray or black or a presence of Brown.  Just like clean colors, dirty colors can range  from light to very dark.

Here are some examples for you to see.  In this picture we see The “clean” blue  paint paired with the “dirty” flooring.  This isn’t saying that the floors are dirty, but there is the presence of “dirty”  or a mudiness in the flooring.

You can see from this picture that both of the colours are not bad, but that they just shouldn’t be paired with each other.

In this photo you can see how the Taupe/pink fabric does not work with the “clean” Green Pillow. The green pillow ends up making the taupe look really “dirty”.

Here we see the same taupe fabric paired with a “dirty” blue/gray fabric.  Both of the colours are “dirty” and paired together they look really good.

In both these images we see how clean colours really work well together.  Paired with the punches of white and black, these spaces  come alive!  All clean spaces always need a really good dose of white and black for the colours to pop!

Hope this gives some clarification to some of your colour Questions.

So your home work assingment is to go and look at your fabrics, paint on your walls, flooring, and counters.   Are they dirty or are they clean?  Let me know how you make out.

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     Jodi