Stories of Soft Autumn
Which brings us to the final instalment of this very long article series. This one is about storytelling. Storytelling is a huge part of personal style. And this is where undertone comes back in.
Storytelling was always the strong suit of the 12Seasons. While the actual colours might not always agree with the supposed characteristics of the palette (part 4), which in turn don’t always agree with colours found in nature (part 10), and thus colour harmony wasn’t always there, the power of these palettes to evoke different moods and settings remains phenomenal.
What makes them so good at storytelling? It’s because they were curated for their undertone, which sets the scene for the story.
Wait, weren’t undertones bad? In article two, we learned that undertones in individual colours are problematic for colour harmony, because they are result of a temperature clash and thus disharmonious.
However, palettes have two ways of creating undertones: by individual colours having undertones (which we don’t want), but also by curating which hues and classes are represented, and which are left out. And that last step something we can certainly do.
In fact, curating is what I built the Sphere palettes for. The palette has all your potential options laid out. You get to choose what pleases you, what you like to wear, and build your own undertone from that.
Curating is therefore the final step of getting a Sphere palette.
The recipe for curating is actually quite simple: pick the colour that best exemplifies the atmosphere you want to create, which is your undertone, and build the rest of the colours around that. Let’s learn from Soft Autumn how that works.
The Soft Autumn palette relies heavily on faded reds and oranges, dry yellows, tans, beiges and browns, and pale olive greens, and together those take up around two-thirds of the palette. At the heart of this group sits the tan yellow that we might consider to be the undertone.
Some will disagree with me and say the dull red is the undertone, because it is represented more often than the yellow. Nonetheless, I picked the yellow for two reasons: it is located more centrally in the red-orange-yellow-olive green stretch of the colour wheel that takes up that chunk. Secondly, the Soft Autumn neutrals appear predominantly yellow-based. All together, there are more colours ‘looking’ at yellow than there are colours that are ‘looking’ at red, or any other colour.
So an undertone is a colour that is represented most or at least a lot, and appears to have influence over at least half of the palette colours, including the neutrals. It doesn’t need to be the brightest colour or even the most commonly occurring, although that certainly helps reinforce it.
We can apply the same recipe to your Sphere palette. And because you can choose any colour you want as the undertone, you can create any vibe you would like. No more need for Season envy, ever!
At this point, you might wonder if that’s really going to work. Doesn’t the tonality and temperature affect what aesthetic your palette can create?
Yes and no. The clear red in a Bright palette is always going to be louder than the clear red in a Soft, will be more visible from across the room.
However, when we look in context of the palette, within the context of the person: the reds will look the same. The clear red in a Soft doesn’t look soft. The clear red in a Bright doesn’t look bright. Both look just red.
This the ‘functionality principle’: any clear red in the context of its own palette, no matter temperature or tonality, functions as just that: a clear red. The same goes for any other hue and class (pastel, dark, neutral etc).
However, as much as I already knew about the functionality principle from draping seasons, I didn’t realise what consequences it would have when I started out creating the Sphere palettes.
Quite early on, I realised I needed to uncouple temperature and tonality (part 3). With 5 categories for temperature and 9 for tonality, I knew that meant 45 different palettes. Admittedly, that is a crazy high number. I was very worried that we wouldn’t be able to see any differences between them.
Fast forward through many months of research and sample making. The palettes start to take shape. And you know what? They all looked exactly the same! When holding them side by side it was easy to see the differences, but by themselves, they all looked the same.
At that point I got really worried about it – until I realised this is what is supposed to happen. When palettes are complete, harmonious and correctly calibrated, there are no undertones and neither will there be excess grey, white, black or loudness within any palette.
Every colour has the same function relative to the rest of the colours, across palettes. As I now learned all over again, clear red functions as just a clear red, no matter how cool or warm, bright or soft, light or dark a palette is. And so do yellow and pastel blue and dark purple and every other colour.
As a result, all palettes look the same, even if side by side they appear wildly different. Which means that all palettes have the same potential for storytelling. The complete potential for storytelling, in fact. You can mimic any Season, or try other stories besides.
Depending on how much variety or cohesion you like in your style , you might curate per outfit, or your entire wardrobe.
The curating process starts at the end of a colour analysis, but will probably continue afterwards. You will get to experiment with your palette and know your colours better, discover what you like and don’t like, and fine-tune accordingly. On top of that, your preferences will continue to evolve as you grow and change over time.
For that reason, clients will receive a more detailed guide on how to create their ideal curated palette from their Sphere.
Reason 12: The Seasons are prematurely curated.
So instead: Sphere palettes have their complete potential for curating and storytelling.