Black and White like True Winter
Adding neutrals to the Sphere palettes was a great deal less dramatic than adding darks. Of course the neutrals went everywhere. This time I just saw it coming.
The tonal class of the neutrals are the colours that are very close to neutral grey, white and black. They are mostly greys and mushroom-like colours. After some experiments, I decided they came in two families: the white-grey-black family, and the cream-taupe-desaturated brown family.
How dark the black was and how light the white, would depend on the tonality. Bright palettes would get the whitest white and the blackest black, since that balances best with the brightest colours. Note the subtle difference with 12Seasons: True Winter, a Bright-Dark, gets the darkest black rather than the Bright tonality, for reasons of temperature rather than brightness.
Yet I found through tests that the temperature of a black comes from its hue, not its value – just like the darks, just like the pastels, just like the clear colours. Needing more blue in a black is not dependent on value.
The only exception is when the value gets so low that you cannot have any hue: absolute zero value black, black-hole-black. Therefore it is either neutral or ‘temperature-less’ (I’m not sure which). Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about it because black hole black is outside of the human range anyway. The reason is, humans reflect light, while black holes do not. The darkest black in the human range is a still a bit lighter than absolute zero black.
So we keep the blackest black and the whitest white for the Brights.
The lightest blacks and the darkest whites went to the Softs. Everything else got intermediate black and whites, neatly adjusted for Light or Dark or anything in between. I did this quite early on in development, and I lost track of how many versions I made, but in the end I landed on black and white values that made sense for each tonality.
Value ranges sorted, now I had to figure out hue. Neutrals are very desaturated: the amount of ‘hue’ they have is very minimal. Still, temperature comes from hue, and the neutrals are no exception. Greys are based on the green via blue to purple part of the spectrum, with green making the warmest greys and purple the coolest greys. Incidentally, that purple was a surprise: I originally expected blue to be the coolest. Taupes, the mushroom colours, ran from violet and pink (cool) via red to orange/yellow (warm).
And this is going to sound unsurprising if you’ve read this far in the series: anyone can have the drama of the True Winter high contrast black and white, neatly adjusted for your palette’s value limits.
With each palette including their white-grey-black family and the cream-taupe-brown family, you even have added variability for high contrast. Opt for black and white for the most formal effect, regal and cool (in the absolute temperature sense).
In addition, you can choose the more elegant and timeless option: black with cream. Combine cream and brown for warm weather glamour. Or give it a modern twist by pairing white with brown. Getting the True Winter drama is not limited by what temperature and tonality you have, once you know how to adjust for each. We all have the potential.
And if you don’t want the high contrast of True Winter, there are of course the middle values of grey and taupe as well.
Reason 7: Black and white occur in every palette, not just in Winter.
So: All Sphere palettes have their white-grey-black and cream-taupe-brown neutral families.
At this point, I had all the colours for the Sphere palettes ready to go. But how to present them? The next article will be about physical palette design.