The reason I asked was because Sarah made an arrangement the other day that looked like a triadic color combination. She used lavender lace-capped hydrangea with smallish yellow-orange sunflowers. Combined with the deep green leaves from both the hydrangea and sunflowers, she hit three colors equidistant on the color wheel.

The thing is, she also used white daisies (maybe asters?) in the arrangement. It looked very nice and when I reread this post, I didn’t see any mention of white (or black).

It’s hard trying to wrap my techie brain around these artsy design ideas but I’m trying. Very informative and interesting… looking forward to upcoming posts. Thanks!

There are two categories of color: Pigment and Light. And they treat black and white oppositely (is that a word??).

In video (light color — say, if you’re a techno-bob who might know the call letters to the Starship Enterpise ), white is the combination of all color, and black is the absence of color.

In pigment (for the more artsy-types) — paint, dye…flowers — black would be all color (mix all colors together, you get something close), and white would be…none.

A color wheel, by design, deals only with hues – the rainbow of all colors in a ring. It doesn’t address the convergence or combination of color, which is what you’d need for white or black.

But we have a post coming up about saturation and value…and value is where white, at least in layman’s terms, comes into play. So maybe that will help!