I love monochromatic color schemes for their simplicity and elegance! Limiting number of color choices opens up doors to creative freedom.

Exploring the world of monochromatic colors is also a great way to start learning color theory in a practical way.

It is very easy to create and use a monochromatic color scheme. We are working with a single color hue, so there is no need to think about perfect color combinations; that can get complicated really quickly…

Below is a step by step guide to creating your own monochromatic color schemes.

But first…

Monochromatic color wheel

We will be working with a color wheel. Sometimes it is referred to as monochromatic color wheel which is acceptable, but not technically correct.

Color wheel presents 12 main color hues and their monochromatic variants (tints and shades).

Traditional color wheel is a simplified model of the color space (that spans from purple to red with every other color inbetween). Theoretically the number of slices can be infinite, but for practical use it is commonly limited to 12 (kind of like a box of crayons). Thats more than enough for most applications!

Our color wheel also shows 2 shades and 2 tints for each main hue (thus 5 circles):

Shades are created by adding black to the main hue, and tints are created by adding white. Again, there can be infinite number of shades and tints, as well as tones (added grey), but for practical reason it makes sense to limit that number to something more managable. Besides if we use too many shades and tints our eye, many of them will look identical to our eye.

With this short overview of the color wheel out of the way, let’s now look into creating a monochromatic color schemes!

I will show you 3 ways you can create a monochromatic color palettes!

1. Working with the color wheel

There might be only 12 hues to pick from on the color wheel, but it might still be hard to choose the right one. I won’t be getting into the meaning and symbolism behind colors, you can learn about that from other sources, for example this article on Canva.

Blue is very popular choice for night landscape and cityscape paintings and illustrations. Orange and red are a great choice for daytime paintings.

If you are looking to design around an existing illustration of photograph, you might want to access colors that already exist there, and pick a hue accordingly. Remember that colors don’t exist in a vacuum, but are always seen in relation to other colors. They can complement or clash.

Let’s take green-blue hue as an example.

It is represented by a single slice on the color wheel:

Here we have 5 different color values to work with. You can easily adjust the values to be darker or lighter, or add more values if you’d like. And of course you don’t even need to use all of them. You can choose to use 2 or 3, or even just 1.

2. Working with color picker

Color wheel is a great reference that helps us understand how colors relate to one another. You can simply look at a slice on the wheel and there is your monochromatic palette!

But what do you do if a color wheel is not handy?

Another way to create a monochromatic color schemes is by using a color picker that can be found in any design software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, etc.

You can produce variations of base color by moving along the horizontal edge of the color picker to get tints (added white), and vertical edge to get the shades (added black). Move away from the edges to get the tones (added grey).

3. Creating custom color swatches

Creating color schemes using a color picker is a bit of a manual process, so here is another trick.

Let’s recreate the same green-blue monochromatic palette that we saw on the color wheel before.

First draw 5 rectangles like so:

Now fill the right 2 right rectangles with pure black and the other ones with pure white:

Now copy this group of rectangles and lay them on top of each other. And color the new group with the same color. It should look something like this:

I offset the top group to show you what you should have underneath, so don’t offset it on purpose. You should see something like this:

Now working from the very middle reduce the opacity of rectangles to the very left and to the right of the middle one to 75%. Do the same for the very left and the very right rectangle but set the opacity to 50%. Don’t change the middle one!

This is make the rectangles slightly more transparent and the fill will blend with black and white underneath giving you shades and tints of the original hue.

You should see something like this:

And that is our green-blue monochromatic color scheme.

But wait, here is the best part!

Now you can simply change the fill color of the top rectangles and get a monochromatic color scheme for any other hue with just couple clicks!

Boom, orange colors!

Couple more clicks, and here are your greens!

You can literally create infinite number of color schemes this way.

Moreover you can adjust shades and tints manually by changing the opacity of each rectangle to whatever you want. Just remember the contrast!

I personally like this method much more than playing with a color picker.

Keep contrast between values low if you are going for a dreamy, moody look, or keep contrast high for more bold, vibrant and engaging design.

4. Working with online tools

Monochromatic color schemes can also be created with online tools like Adobe Color:

Make sure to change the color harmony rule to “monochromatic”, and you are set to go. Adobe color wheel includes many more colors, so you can fine tune your hue selection as well as adjust values of every color swatch.

And if you are looking for a no-brainer kind of experience, Coolors is just the tool for you!

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Learn more about monochrome colors and monochromatic design:

• How to design with monochromatic colors by Canva
• Monochromatic Coloring And Monochrome Design by DesignBold