The color wheel, which you will have seen at some point in your life - even if it’s only in a paint shop - tells you the relationships between different colors. It’s as useful for home décor as it is for making your artistic masterpieces look wonderful.

Colors can either compliment (i.e. match) each other or clash and detract from one another. It’s all down to where they are on the color wheel, which shows shades and hues fading into one another. You don’t need an eye for design or a good sense of color: a little basic information about the color wheel will help you be able to put colors together with confidence. It even helps for your outfit for that perfect night out.

A color wheel helps you to see how colors relate to each other. As you might expect, the basic building blocks of the color wheel begin with the primary colors; there are three of them – red, blue and yellow – out of which all other colors that exist can be made. There’s a piece of information for you – did you know that?

Various degrees of color are mixed to form the shades which are to be found between the three primary color segments around the color wheel. Every color that it’s possible to have lies somewhere on the color wheel, but of course, no printed color wheel – such as those you find in paint shops – can place every color which exists.

The color wheel is great for showing you which colors go nicely together. Colors which sit side by side on the color wheel are therefore similar to each other and as a result they will go well together, even if you use equal amounts together – for instance in a room color scheme. Colors which are opposite each other on the color wheel are complimentary. They too go together, but not in equal amounts; with complementary colors, one color should dominate, whilst you add splashes of the other color as accents.

Those above guidelines work for combinations of two colors; now let’s add a third color into the mix, if you’ll excuse the pun. With three colors, there are three different color arrangements that will give you an attractive match. You could use three colors next to each other on the color wheel, perhaps by having the middle of the three colors the main color and accenting it with the color on each side of it on the color wheel.

Secondly, for some strange reason – it works if you use three colors that are equi-distant from each other on the color wheel. They work together to make a harmonious color scheme.

The third color scheme that works with three colors is to use the colors directly to either side of the direct compliment of your main color. This gives a nicely balanced color scheme.

When you use four colors, things get complicated, as you might imagine. As a rule of thumb, harmonious color scheme is made by using four colors which are equ-distant from each other on the color wheel. However, you need to be very careful about the amount of each color which you use so as not to throw your color scheme off-balance. Perhaps you might be best advised to look through design books and catalogues to see what works first if you want to try making a color scheme with four colors.

So, you can see that the color wheel, when used properly, is a really useful device for selecting a color scheme. It will help you to decide which colors match and which colors clash. However, all the knowledge of the color wheel will not take over for personal taste. The color wheel provides some guidelines, but for a color scheme to work for you, you have to like it. You should remember to test out your colors side before to see what they look like together before you commit to spending a lot of time and money on a color scheme which you may not like.