Q and A: How dark can bright winters go? Can we dip darker than our palette?

Here’s the thing. A Bright Winter needs high chroma (brightness/clarity of colour) to survive, they can of course take less chroma, but it is the clarity of colour which unifies with their natural colouring. Keep in mind that chroma is the most important dimension to get right when it comes to achieving and maintaining natural colour harmony.

Colours tend to be brightest (highest in chroma) when they are around the middle of the value scale, as they darken (shade) or lighten (tint) they tend to loose their clarity.

This is the reason why most of the BW colours are found in neither the very light, nor the very dark areas of colour space-the colours are simply unavailable.  Each of the twelve tones contain the same internal logic between chroma and value changes.

BW’s look great in almost everything, their colouring suffering the least negative side effects of an imbalance of value and chroma; they don’t get destroyed by disharmony rather than just looking ‘underdone’.