WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT ME?
HERE’S WHAT I BELIEVE…
being able to understand colour is as fundamental as being able to read
The visual language of colour is as valid as written or spoken language, and everyone deserves to have a foundational understanding of colour literacy and eventually, colour fluency.
you don’t have to be an artist to deserve this understanding
Not all readers become great writers, but where would those writers be without people to turn their pages?
you don’t have to be an art teacher to share a passion for colour with others
Our world is a colourful place, and the more we understand about colour, the more we can be inspired to celebrate that with anyone blessed with eyes to see it.
The most important thing you can learn about colour may be that you learned it wrong
You can’t learn to read if your alphabet is missing a vowel. You can’t learn music if your piano is out of tune. And you can’t learn colour by spinning a wonky wheel…
I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT YOU!
Are you an artist, designer, teacher, or any-kinda-colour-lover looking for a new way to expand your spectrum for the 21st Century, instead of spinning your wheel with outmoded systems?
Are you tired of tools that don’t quite make sense, don’t interact well with the way you work, and don’t give you a foundational framework to match theory to practice, no matter what your medium?
Are you ready to finally make sense of colour theory and boost your colour confidence?
ARE YOU READY TO BREAK thROUGH cOLOUR?
Hi. I'm Tracy.
I’m the Creator of BreakThroughColour, an interactive hands-on playing card-based system of non-traditional concepts and original tools for understanding, exploring, and celebrating colour.
Here are three things you need to know about me:
1 : I
2 : LOVE
3 : COLOUR!
I’m guessing you’re here because you love colour too.
Maybe you’re an artist, or a maker of colourful things.
Maybe you’re a teacher, someone who loves to share their passion for colour.
Maybe you’re a student, of fine art, fashion, illustration, or design.
Maybe you’re a designer of objects, or spaces, or special events.
Maybe you’re a collector of colour that you wear, share, or use to decorate your home.
Maybe you’re a game player, you see colour as a toy to play with, or a puzzle to be solved.
Maybe you’re a parent, curious to find new ways to teach your kids about colour so they can love it too.
Whatever the reason, here you are, and I’m so glad you are, because I’m all those things too. I’m an artist, a teacher, a designer. I like games and toys and puzzles. I’m a mom with a partner and we live a very colourful life doing what we love.
What I’m really loving these days is colour. Did I mention that?
I should also mention this . . .
COLOUR HASN'T ALWAYS LOVED ME
You too? Ahhh... maybe that’s why you’re here. Colour confused? Stuck in the mud? Completely hueless? I get that, because that was me, spinning my colour wheel, but never really getting anywhere.
I've known about ‘primary colours’ since I was in primary school. And there are lots of colour resources out there: wheels, websites, kids' books, colour books, colouring books, ebooks, flip books, fan books, charts, recipes, models, maps, apps... But even with all this, I couldn’t find a single simple system that really made sense to me in my head and was also useful and practical in my hands.
So I designed one.
THIS IS BREAKTHROUGHCOLOUR...
COLOUR GETS A KICKSTART
BreakThroughColour began in 2009 as a card-based concept and a handful of hues. Picture me with notebooks full of crazy codes and formulas, and hand-cut cards coloured in with crayons... I still have those first decks!
After a few years of testing, tweaking, and prototyping, I started beta-tested BTC in small workshops, seminars, and classrooms. With positive feedback and increasing interest, I gave BreakThroughColour its global debut in June 2015 as a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter. BTC breached the funding goal in less than 3 hours and was endorsed by 561 Backers in 34 countries.
COLOUR GETS A CLASSROOM
Five years after BTC’s debut as a collection of original tools, the BreakThroughColour system itself became the focus, featured as the foundation for an online school and global colour practice community.
The BTC Colour Academy opened its doors on May 1, 2020. More than 400 students from 32 countries have already gathered together to share their curiosity and commitment to colour.
A NEW COLOUR CARDS COLLECTION IS COMING SOON!
The original Kickstarter Colour Cards and Colour Cubes are no longer available.
Complete this form if you would like to be notified about upcoming Colour Card print runs:
In the mean time, here’s a closer look at the original concept, cards, and cubes that debuted as the first big chapter in BTC’s colourful backstory . . .
Colour + cards = colour cards
In theory, BreakThroughColour is an abstract system, a new way to explore, understand, work with, play with, and simply celebrate colour.
In practice, BreakThroughColour is a deck of cards, like a regular deck of playing cards, but with more colour. And more breakthrough.
traditional wheel of colour, traditional deck of cards
A traditional colour wheel is a system too, and it's been the 'Go To' tool for artists, designers, and teachers for a very long time, showing Hues, Tints, Shades, and Tones with cut-out covers that you can rotate to reveal more mixes and matches. But that's just it. You can move the covers, but you can't move the colours. Don't get me wrong, it's a great 'training wheel,' but no matter how you spin it, a traditional colour wheel can only take you so far.
A traditional deck of cards is great in its own way too, and who doesn't like a quiet game of solitaire, a round of Bridge, or a magic trick? But aside from black and red, not even the Joker can teach you much about colour.
That's why I took those little wedges of colour right off the wheel and I made them bigger. Big enough to hold in your hands and really move around, just like a deck of cards. I also added lots more colours.
Colour Fan | all 216 BreakThroughColour Colour Cards
This is The BTC216 Colour Cards deck, a full spectrum of 216 hold-in-your-hands colours that combines a comprehensive and cohesive colour system with the usability, accessibility, and fun of playing cards.
COLOUR BY COLOURS
Eight sets of 27 cards each, one set for each of BTC's 8 Corner Colours: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, White, Red, Green, Blue, and Black
The full deck of Colour Cards can be sorted into eight smaller decks, like suits. There's a deck for each of 6 ‘colour wheel’ Hues, plus a White deck and a Black deck.
With 30 Hues, 60 Tints, 60 Shades, 60 Tones, plus White, Black, and 4 Hue Greys, you can move, mix, and shuffle them into so many possible palettes, it’s almost impossible to imagine.
But go ahead. Imagine. Think about that for a minute. With 216 different Colours, each one its own Colour Card, imagine what is possible...
BTC Colour Cards | the Colour Side
Sorted by Hue, sequenced by Value, or simply shuffled into an infinite assortment of surprising schemes, these hold-in-your-hand over-the-edge mix-and-match swatches of colour are perfect to showcase a colour on its own, but even better when they work and play with one another. An accessible (but addictive) way to explore the interaction of colour, they are easy to move, and hard to put down.
But the real breakthrough of BreakThroughColour isn't just the colours on the Colour Side. It's what’s on the other side that really counts...
COLOUR BY CODES
The other side of every BreakThroughColour Colour Card is the Code Side, a visual array of numbers, letters, squares, and sliders that breaks each code down and then adds it back up again to tell you a whole lot more about each colour: what it's actually made of, how pure it is, and how light or dark it is. In other words, its Hue, Saturation, and Value.
Just like the numbers and symbols on playing cards, you can use these ciphers to sort, sequence, mix, match, and connect any or all of your Colour Cards with any or all of the others, following standard colour schemes, or breaking the rules to explore and design your own personal palettes.
original BTC216 Colour Cards | the Code Side
All this code may look un-crackable, but trust me, it’s deceptively simple to decipher. If you can count from 0 to 5, you can crack the code, break through colour, and take it to a new dimension.
Literally.
COLOUR, CUBED
Colour is 3-dimensional.
BreakThroughColour is 3-dimensional too, and this is the BreakThroughColour Colour Cube:
The BreakThroughColour 216 Colour Cube | a 3D model to complement the 216 Colour Cards in the BTC216 deck
The BTC216 Colour Cube is a 3D model that I designed to complement the 216 Colour Cards in the BTC216 deck. It shows not just what the colours are as mixes of C, M, and Y, but where they are in relation to one another in a 3-dimensional colour space.
Using the same 3 'element primary' ingredients, every coded colour in the Colour Cards deck has its own place in this 3D Colour Cube. Hues, Tints, and Shades are on the outside, and the Tones (those muddier colours that get hidden in the middle) are right where you’d expect them to be, hiding in the middle...
The BreakThroughColour Colour Cube isn't just one big cube, it’s eight smaller cubes that fit together, one for each of the eight colour families. How cool is that? Just like you can divide the big deck of 216 cards into eight smaller decks of 27, you can divide the big cube into eight smaller cubes of 27, and see the Tones, Tints, Shades and Hues from every angle.
You can’t do that with a colour wheel.
take a closer look at Cyan, surrounded by its family of variant Hues, Tints, and Shades
As 1 of 8 Corner Colours, the Cyan Cube is 1 of 8 Corner Cubes that fit together to make the bigger BTC Colour Cube, showing the Hues, Tints, and Shades on the outside, and the Tones on the inside
The original BTC216 :: 216 coded Colour Cards, and matching 6x6x6 Cubes that define their place in the 3D colour space
The assortment of colours in The BTC216 way outnumbers the gamut you get on most colour wheels. A must-have design tool for the colour professional, this boxed set is BTC’s flagship deck, but it stacks up to only about half of the Colour Card colours there are in the complete BreakThroughColour system.
Building on the exponential power of three primary colours – Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow – every breakthrough begins with the Basics . . .
in the Colour Basics Colour Cube, C, M, and Y radiate out from the ‘nothing’ of White to replace X, Y, and Z as the primary ingredients of this foundational colour space
COLOUR BASICS
The Colour Basics Colour Cube shows the colours you get when three primary colours take three steps to connect and intersect with one another in three directions. The power of 3 x 3 x 3 is what gives us the 27 colours in this foundational Colour Cube.
The Colour Basics Colour Cards deck includes these 27 colours… and then some.
Colour Basics is a BTC 'starter deck' that brings us full circle back to the beginning. It includes 48 different Colour Cards, just like the Hues, Tints, Shades, and Tones you’d find on a traditional colour wheel.
Colour Basics also includes White and Black, 3 Hue Greys, and a scale of 9 True Greys, a Value-able reference for understanding colour, without its colour.
As an accessible but 'full-spectrum' introduction to the basics of colour (or as a 'double deck-er' booster for the bigger boxed set of 216), Colour Basics has it covered.
QUANTITY AND QUALITY
Since its official 'kickstart' in June 2015, BreakThroughColour has evolved into an established collection of 400 different Colour Cards.
BTC Colour Cards are printed on 330gsm German card stock, considered one of the finest quality playing card papers available. Features include:
durable weight and thickness
an extra smooth finish for easy handling
a black paper core to ensure opacity front to back
bright white outer layers for best visual contrast and true vivid colours
WHO WANTS TO BREAK THROUGH COLOUR?
ARTISTS
BreakThroughColour is a fundamental tool for the studio. Picture all those big swatches of colour, sitting on your work table, easy to reach and use like little colour avatars to plan your next palette, or get you through a colour block. Take them on a buying trip; use them to design your next collection or customize a custom order; work with them in a workshop; or bring them to your next retreat or art class to show and share with others.
BTW, the Colour Side may be your muse, but the Code Side may surprise you with its secrets to reveal itself as a validating and integral part of your creative process. When you really understand the rules of colour, the more fun it will be to 'break through' and break 'em!
DESIGNERS
Right out of the box, BTC is a great starting point for design, a reliable reference to inspire and guide your team in house, and a new way to communicate in colour with clients, wherever they are.
In this wired world, we often just 'pick with a click.' Computer colour pickers are handy, but BTC is a great reason to step away from the screen, lay your cards on the table, and really connect with colour in the real world. When you're ready to turn your analogue sketches and schemes into digital renderings and websites, there are RGB and Hex Codes on every card to guide you towards your gamut. And it works the other way too. Use BTC's codes and formulas to bring your virtual colours and palettes back out into your work with other media in the real world.
TEACHERS
The BTC system is a dynamic, interactive resource to explore and explain colour as an element of art. Or math. Or science. Or better yet, let your students figure it out for themselves.
“Okay class, hands up, who wants to play cards?”
“Can we build with blocks instead?”
Yes. You can. Seriously. How fun is that?
Begin with the Basics as a strong start for early learners, then level up with the bigger box of BTC216 Colour Cards and matching Cube Cards. For preschool, homeschool, high school, and higher, BTC is leading the way as a 'new school' tool, a perfect way to ready your curriculum for colour in the 21st century.
GAMERs
In addition to being a game-changer for colour pros and educators, turns out these colourful playing cards are pretty cool playing cards. BTC games (and games in development) include Level Up, 9-Square Solitaire, Straight Six, Perfect Match, and Game of Tones. Anyone for a game of colour?
CARDISTS
Colourful cuts, a full-spectrum spring... what moves could you master? With cards like these up your sleeve, what tricks could you devise? Flourish and magic are part of the breakthrough.
FAMILY AND Friends
BTC will add colour to your coffee table, card table, cottage, and conversation. Plan a palette or plan a wedding, design a quilt or decorate the whole house. Shuffle the cards and let yourself go with the flow, or put your colour ‘eyeQ’ to the test.
Theming, scheming, dreaming...
COLOUR MATTERS
Accessible and user-friendly, yet complete and comprehensive, BreakThroughColour has a place at work and play, in studios, workshops, design houses, schools, colleges, libraries, art institutes, galleries, museums, science centres... anywhere colour matters.
If you ask me, colour matters everywhere.
With full colour on one side and drill-down codes on the other, in sortable cards and stackable cubes, with just the Basics or beyond to the BTC deck, BreakThroughColour is a perfect balance between open-ended exploration and zeroed-in logic; creative chaos and unified theory; interactive playful and informative educational; mixed-up and moveable or fixed in place in a whole new space.
Colour by colours or colour by codes, BTC is a math-a-magical meeting place between the art and science... It’s colour for both sides of your brain.
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MORE INFO
Thanks for your interest in BTC and thanks for stopping by here to read all ABOUT it. If you have any questions or inquiries, please contact me directly any time. Your feedback and suggestions are also always welcome.