Hi Gary,
Yes you could go either route. Personally, I would just create my own Color Scheme manually.
Yes, if you want to add your own Custom Color Scheme then you would have to edit your PHP file. So if you’re going to do so, make sure you know what you’re doing, or at least use FTP while editing your files just in case you make a mistake (using FTP and an external HTML/CSS/PHP editor will allow you to fix mistakes by clicking your “undo” option inside the program)……if you don’t use this, and you use WordPress itself, then if you make a mistake the error will prevent you from being able to access your WP admin, and pretty much everything else beyond FTP (so please use FTP if you can).
You can look at the functions.php file and see the other color schemes and copy/paste the way they are setup.
It should look something like this for the functions file –
// Create additional color style options
add_theme_support( 'genesis-style-selector', array(
'epik-black' => __( 'Black', 'epik' ),
'epik-blue' => __( 'Blue', 'epik' ),
'epik-darkblue' => __( 'Dark Blue', 'epik' ),
'epik-gray' => __( 'Gray', 'epik' ),
'epik-green' => __( 'Green', 'epik' ),
'epik-orange' => __( 'Orange', 'epik' ),
'epik-pink' => __( 'Pink', 'epik' ),
'epik-purple' => __( 'Purple', 'epik' ),
'epik-red' => __( 'Red', 'epik' ),
) );
So simply copy/paste one of the color/lines and replace it with the custom color you want.
Next, you’ll need to look at the theme color section of the CSS file (somewhere near the bottom, right before the Responsive section). If you’re already familiar with CSS and how it works, then it should be self explanatory and easy to customize.