Picking Between Warm and Cool Colors
It may seem obvious, but it's a good idea to think about a theme for your coin design. If you have corporate artwork or unit emblems prepared for a coin design, then you will have plenty to work with before getting started. Warm colors, like reds, oranges and yellows, are active and vivid. They tend to excite people who see them. Cool colors fall into the spectrum of greens, blues and violets, and they tend to have a calming effect on most people. Designs that mix too many colors end up being distracting and hard to take in. Complimentary colors ensure that a design is pleasing, and that artwork draws the eye to particular areas making it easy to process and appreciate.When you submit a request for artwork to Signature Coins, we often ask what plating option you’d like; this is because choosing a plating option is the best starting point when deciding on a color theme. Our options for gold and copper plating work best with warm colors, while silver plating options work best with cool colors. Coins plated in nickel or black metal work well with either warm or cool colors.
Coins With Antique Plating
Coins plated in antique gold or silver are much less reflective than their high polish counterparts. This means that unpainted artwork will have natural shadows and slightly different hues in the raised and recessed areas of the artwork. While dark colors are best for high polish plating to add much-needed contrast, antique plating works with just about anything. So, feel free to add some brighter colors to your design. These are just a few examples of antique plated coins that use color in a subtle way to brighten the artwork.
Coins With High Polish Plating
High polish plating is very reflective. This can be an excellent way to make a striking design, but you need to be careful that the plating does not outshine your artwork. If a coin focuses too much on high polish plating, glare or smudging can distract from the more intricate aspects of design. As this example shows, the finer details in the artwork are easier to see in the antique gold plating on the left than they are in the high polish gold plating on the right.
Including color creates a beautiful contrast in artwork and helps you get the most out of any kind of high polish coin design. This next coin we created for Facebook is cast in high polish silver. The blue and black colorfills work especially well at drawing the eye towards the gear shape of the larger coin and the mountains and ridges of the smaller coin. Adding these colors helps define the most intricate parts of the artwork.
Besides adding colorfills, a few more ways to create contrast in a high polish design are recessed sandblasting and dual plating. If you look carefully at the facebook coin, you will see a textured surface on the larger coin between the blue gear design and the edge. This is recessed sandblasting. It makes the surface less reflective and more resistant to smudging. While not as bright as adding colorfills, recessed sandblasting does add a subtle amount of contrast and may be all that your design needs. When it comes to dual plating, sometimes you don’t need any colorfill to fashion the perfect design.
Adding Color with Dual Plating
Dual plating is the combination of two or more plating options and is the perfect way to mix and match the natural colors each style of plating offers. This coin is a combination of black nickel plating and antique copper plating. The end result is a striking and well-balanced design that does not rely on colorfill to add life to the artwork.
Black Metal Challenge Coins
You don’t necessarily need high polish plating to make a striking design. These black metal coins use highly contrasting colors to add emphasis to the artwork and draw the eye to the intricacy of the small details in the design. While high polish coins reflect light, black metal coins absorb incoming light. Without adding color to the design, the artwork will be impossible to see unless you have a strong light source. Blues, reds and whites are some of the best colors to include with a black metal design.
