Color is typically the first thing you see but often the hardest to truly understand when you first get into floral design. At the beginning, you might think the task is fairly straightforward: you just gather a bunch of flowers that are all gorgeous on their own and put them together in a container. Yet somehow, the finished bouquet seems lifeless, garish, or chaotic even though all the individual flowers were stunning. It’s not that you have bad taste; more often it is that you don’t quite yet know how to control contrast. In flowers, color is more than just choosing colors you like. It is knowing which tones should lead, which can play supporting roles, and which should quietly let the arrangement breathe. A great palette is born when you go from asking yourself, “Do these flowers look nice?” to asking, “What is each color here for?”
A useful way to develop your color sense is to work with only three color roles in a single design. Pick one dominant color (the most visible area), one transitional color (which subtly shifts the feeling), and one accent color (which should appear in a very small amount). For instance, cream can be the dominant tone, sage the transitional tone, and wine the accent. The exercise is useful because it forces control. When you allow all of your colors to be dominant, the design loses its anchor. When one tone is dominant, you have a strong effect. Try different color combinations, but keep the same three-tone format. With repetition, you will learn that the harmony of flowers isn’t accidental. It is about balance of color just as much as it is about what the colors are.
A common error with color in flowers is picking each individual piece in different locations without knowing what you’re going to do when you bring them together for arranging. A rose that was ivory in a display case can end up yellow when it sits next to a creamy ranunculus; a fuchsia carnation can seem a lot brighter when it is placed by a dusty mauve peony. The best thing to do is to assemble all of the stems on a blank counter before you do your arranging. Look at the stems together for a minute before you touch them. That is a more useful practice than it might first appear. You’re going to see if there are temperature or light mismatches, if one of the colors is unexpectedly intense, or whether a bunch of them is canceling each other out. Another issue is including too many colors just because they have interesting undertones. It’s easy to solve by using fewer stems in those particular colors. Drop the offending stem, and reexamine the design. With flowers, subtraction can be the best answer to color problems.
If color still feels like a challenge, set aside 15 minutes for a short, color-focused drill. Use the flowers you have, or even just cut stems, and create three mini designs that don’t involve a container or foam. In the first one, put all the flowers in the design in the same temperature family, such as all off-white, pale apricot, and light chartreuse. In the second one, use the flowers in a design to make a very soft contrast (pink against burnt orange or pale lavender against butter yellow), and in the third, experiment with a slightly stronger contrast pair but only place one or two of the accent flowers. After you complete each design, look at it and determine: did it appear lighter? More subdued? Richer? Less balanced? That type of drill provides you with a vocabulary for colors. As soon as you can name what a color in a design is doing, you can start to control that color.
Your critiques of flower designs are going to become a lot more helpful as soon as you move beyond your individual likes and dislikes and start talking about mood and visual harmony. Instead of just asking whether a design looks beautiful, ask if it feels soothing, heavy, disjointed, muted, or too bold. Those responses help guide your revisions. If you say that a bouquet feels disjointed, it’s likely that you have your accent colors in too many different areas of the design. If it feels “flat,” perhaps you need to add a dark color or an additional cool tone to make it pop. And taking photos of designs and making them black and white can help as well. Once you remove the color, you can see the values (brightnesses) much more easily, and you might realize that flowers close in value are blending together even though they aren’t actually the same color.
Your best way to get better with color in flowers is to use the same color families over and over rather than always seeking out new colors. In other words, keep using the same cream, blush, green, and berry tones to create different designs. Over time, your eyes will start to learn the color of texture. You will learn that a shiny piece of greenery will turn the temperature of your entire design, or that a single darker flower will balance out a very soft arrangement without overpowering it. And when color stops being something you add to the design, and starts becoming part of the design itself, you’ve come a long way. Now the flower arrangement isn’t about luck. It is about looking closely, editing what is there, and knowing what goes well with what.
