warm; that
is, there should be a preponderance of cold colors over warm, or vice
versa. Otherwise the eye will suffer just that order of uneasiness
which comes from the contemplation of two equal masses, whereas it
experiences satisfaction in proportionate unequals.

Nothing will take the place of an instinctive colour-sense, but even
that needs the training of experience, if the field be new, and a few
general principles of all but universal application will not be amiss.

First of all it should be remembered that the intensity of color
should be carefully adjusted to its area. It is dangerous to try to
use high, pure colors, unrelieved and uncontrasted, in large masses,
but the brightest, strongest colors may be used with safety in units
of sufficiently restricted size. For harmony, as well as for richness,
the law of complementaries, in its most general application, is
the safest of all guides, but it must be followed with fine
discrimination. Complementary colors are like married pairs, if they
find the right adjustment with one another they are happy--that is,
there is an effect of beauty--but lacking such adjustment they are
worse off together than apart. Every artist who experiments in color
soon finds out for himself that instead of using two colors directly
complementary, it is better to "split" one of them, that is, use
instead of one of them two others, which combined will yield the
color in question. For example, the color complementary to red is
green-blue. Now green-blue is equidistant between yellow-green and
blue-violet, so if for red and blue-green; red, yellow-green and
blue-violet be substituted the combination loses its obviousness and
a certain harshness without losing anything of its brilliance, or
without departing from the optical law involved. Such a combination
corresponds to a diminished triad in music.

Another important consideration with regard to color as employed by
the architect dwells in those optical changes effected by distance and
position: the relative visibility of different colors and combinations
of colors as the spectator recedes from them, and the environmental
changes which colors undergo--in bright sunlight, in shadow, against
the sky, and with relation to backgrounds of different sorts.

The effect of distance is to make colors merge into one another, to
lower the values, but not all equally. Yellow loses itself first,
tending toward white. The effect of distance, in ge