There’s a ton of literature and webpages about colourschemes, and both you and I have better things to do than studying all of them. In the following, therefore, I’ll try to assemble a simple, logical theory of colourschemes that doesn’t take an entire book to explain.

First premise:
There are basically four parameters you can adjust when it comes to colourschemes:

• Contrast: How complementary are the colours?
• Balance: How much are there of each colour compared to the others?
• Position: How are the colours positioned?
• Colour saturation/hue/shading: Strengthening, weakening or altering the individual colours.

Listed in order of importance: for instance, use of the last parameter when building with Lego is severely limited by the available palette)

Second premise:
Depending on how you vary the parameters, the colourscheme will vary between static/dynamic and boring/confusing: The goal is to hit the golden mean where everything is just right (I just recycled a part of my design theory for this one).

First parameter: Contrast (complementary colours)
Theory: Harmonious colourschemes are based on a kind of idealized colouring that; for instance, make flower paintings prettier than the real thing. According to Goethe & co this is because the brain wish to compensate or balance out dominating colours:

If you look at something red, the brain wants green (complementary or opposite colours on the colour-wheel), if you look at heavily saturated red, it wants lighter tones also (opposite saturation), and if the colour is shaded with grey or black, the brain wish to balance this as well.

Returning to the second premise, we don’t want to make things too pretty because it’ll end up too boring, on the other hand, we don’t want it too provoking either, cause at the other end of the scale the colourscheme just collapses into a complete mess.

Since it’s really easy to screw things up, so your best bet is probably to aim at “harmonious with a little twist” – or at least start out from there.

Practice: Somewhat similar to your colour television, the contrast button basically goes from weak greyscale to strong pairs of complementary colours:

Dual complementary colourscheme: Starting at the strong end of the contrast-scale, the dual complementary colourscheme is probably as harsh as it gets, especially if the colours are placed right next to each other.

Tetrad colourschemes: Made out of two pairs of complementary colours with equal distance on the colour-wheel. These colourschemes should combine prettiness (because they contain all the primary colours) with double complementarity. With a twelve-colour colour-wheel, you’ll unfortunately end up with one primary, one secondary and two of the extremely rare tertiary colours.

Split complementary colourshemes: Basically the same as duals, only you’ve split one of the colours into the two neighbouring colours on the colour-wheel in order to water down the contrast.

Triad colourschemes: Made out of three colours with equal distance on the colour-wheel. Pretty because they, like tetrad schemes, contain all of the primary colours, but less contrasting because none of them are directly complementary.

Non-complementary colourschemes: Naturally, colourschemes doesn’t have to be based on complementary pairs of colour. If they’re placed more than 60 degrees from each other on the colour-wheel you might achieve an elegant semi-complementary scheme, because primary and secondary colours from opposite sides of the wheel will be contained within the colours chosen. The same goes for earth tones, as these are based on all three primary colours.
If the colours are placed less than 60 degrees from each other, you could argue that we’re really talking about analogous colourschemes instead:

Analogous colourschemes: Are based on colours sitting close to each other on the colour-wheel such as yellow green, yellow, yellow orange and orange. While this kind of scheme will create pleasing variations in what would usually be one colour + greyscale, they lack the true dynamism of a complementary colourscheme.

One colour + greyscale: One step above plain greyscale, a single colour can add a splash of life that these colourschemes usually lack:

Greyscale colourschemes: With greyscale you can still get a heavy light-dark contrast, however, without the liveliness of colours, most of these schemes end up being either dull greyish or confusing zebra-schemes that are particularly difficult to photograph.

Ok, I haven’t had time to write or photograph more, so instead of dragging things out for several weeks and hit you over the head with a huge(r) blogpost, I’ll cut it off here.
In the following blogposts I plan to continue with the other parameters (balance, positioning, and saturation/hue/shading), followed by a small series of posts with examples of spacemocs announced on CSF (hopefully Jainsguide/CSF moc announcements are back up soon).

Tags: Colour, Colourscheme, contrast

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