Terracotta

Terracotta is one of very few colours that is also a material, so a viewer reads both at once. The palette carries a surface with it, and that surface is matte, porous and handmade.

It is warm without being loud, which is why it survives on a wall, on a floor and on a page equally well.

Treat it as one hue at many depths rather than as a group of oranges. The set is a firing range, not a colour scheme.

Keep the top end pale and warm, like dried slip. That value is what stops the whole thing turning heavy.

Keep the shadows warm. A cool shadow on clay reads as grey dust and kills the fired quality.

Use it for handmade, Mediterranean, domestic and warm subjects: ceramics, interiors, food, packaging, a restaurant identity.

Leave it alone for anything technical or cold. Terracotta cannot be made to look precise.

Desert Sand is the same family at lower saturation, with a grey green and a pale sky in it. Terracotta has no cool note at all.

A monochromatic scheme is the rule underneath this one. Terracotta is that rule with the hue already chosen and a material attached.

Roof tiles around the Mediterranean set the reference, and interiors publishing brought the set back every decade since because it warms a photograph of an empty room.

A pot comes back instead of the subject. The palette is a set of colours, not an object. Name your subject at the front of the clause.

The light end drifts pink and the set turns into makeup. Say one hue throughout, warm orange brown, with no pink.

A glaze appears and the surface goes shiny. Say the surfaces are matte and unglazed.