Creating Colour Schemes

One easy way of 'creating' new colours to use in your images is to add more black to a base colour to create a shade and to add more white to your base colour to create a tint. This is a doddle if you are using Fireworks (ok, you can do this in other applications too, but this site is devoted to Fireworks tutorials :-)).

Draw a square and colour it black. Copy and paste the square and give the new square the base colour. Now if you reduce the opacity of the top (base colour) square, you will see different shades of the original colour. If you keep reducing the opacity of the top square in increments of 20, you can get five shades of the original colour lik so:

Similarly, if you recreate the preceding steps, but use a white square underneath the base colour instead of a black square, you will get the following tints:

The way I normally proceed from here is to place the shades and tints somewhere out of the way, like at the top right of the Fireworks canvas. I can then use the eye dropper to sample the colours in those shades and tints to use on new shapes.