July 5, 2020 Inspirational Art

Vera of Handmade Blossom employs all major hues in this Rainbow Roses pendant.

How comfortable are you feeling about the terminology learned last week? Feel secure in your understanding of values, saturation, tints, shades, and tones? I do hope so because I am going to throw more terminology at you today but, thankfully, these will be pretty familiar to a lot of you although you might have felt uncertain or confused about them previously. For some of you, this will be brand-new which is super exciting and, in a way, it will be much easier for you to take it in, unencumbered by any previous confusion.

These concepts are standard color theory points within the old RYB color set that are also used when using CMY as the primaries. (If you don’t know about the RYB versus CMY situation please take a look at the post “Not the Hue You Know”. It’s a really interesting article, if I do say so myself!)

A wheel to reference as you read. Click to enlarge and open in another window.

Familial Color Relationships

So, if you have been reading my free posted lessons since the beginning of June, you have heard me talk about primary and secondary colors. These terms describe the relationship between colors but if you are going to get the most out of what you’ve been learning, you will need to know about a few more relationships that will be useful for both color mixing and choosing color palettes.

There are three standard terms used to define a kind of hierarchical order among hues that I think resemble a family. You can think of primaries as the elders, secondaries as their children, and tertiaries as their grandchildren.

Primary colors are the colors that cannot be mixed using other colors. On the color wheel we will be using, those three are Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. Since, every color can be mixed from these three (this actually depends on the medium but let’s just go with it for now), they are extremely important and so are at the top of this hierarchy.

Secondary colors are those mixed using two primaries. On the CMY color wheel that is Red, Green, and Blue.

Tertiary colors are those made by mixing a primary and one of its two nearby secondary colors. These include yellow-green, green-cyan, blue-cyan, violet, red-magenta, and orange. You can see the predominance of hyphenated word descriptors for these colors but violet and orange have single word names since they were used on the RYB color wheel that was so prevalent for so many years as well as being identified wavelengths in the scientific world.

Now, for you purple lovers, let me make a side comment. I know, most of us are used to thinking and saying that purple comes between blue and magenta (or red) but purple is not actually a hue. The reason has to do with the light spectrum and the cones in our eyes and all kinds of scientific stuff I don’t think we need to get into. I did start talking in terms of purple earlier in the series of articles but that isn’t technically correct and because so many of you are now working off the CMY color wheel I recommended, and it refers to the color between magenta and blue as violet, I’m going to use the color name violet so as to not confuse too many people and because that really is the correct name.

So, these three types of hues – primaries (of which there are 3), secondaries (of which there are also 3), and tertiaries (of which there are 6) – do not, by far, encompass all the possible hues out there. They do, however, designate 12 useful portions of a color wheel that we can readily work with to identify color relationships necessary to the mixing and choosing of colors.

That was easy, right?

Color Combination Relations

Okay, so we just defined the metaphorical familial relationships between hues. Now, I want to talk about a different kind of relationship– the relationship between combinations of colors. We can think of these as cliques of friends. Just as some people get along with certain other people much better, certain colors get along with other colors much better. This is true for color palettes as well as for color mixing although maybe for color mixing we should think of it as team of coworkers where you put people (colors) together depending on what you need. Are my metaphors making any sense? I can only hope.

I’ll start you would just three color combination relationships – complementary, analogous, and split complementary. There are a number of other commonly used color relationships that fall under the friends/coworkers metaphor such as triads, tetrads, and squares but those won’t be important until we hit color palettes so we won’t muddle up your poor little brains with all that just yet. Plus, these are the only three that knee consideration in both palettes and mixing.

Complementary colors are those that are across the color wheel from each other. They are considered opposites and, if mixed together, they will include all three primaries in varying degrees. This is why compliments “tone” each other down instead of just creating a new hue as discussed last week. If you’re scratching your head, just look at the color wheel and look at any two complementary colors. Jot down what primary colors would make each of them and you’ll find that list would include one of each primary. You can also see the primaries included in each color on the outside edge of the Color Wheel Company’s color wheel.

Complementary violet and yellow-green are used in this polymer and gold ring by An Fen Kuo.

Analogous colors are those next to each other on the color wheel. Choosing 3-5 (out of our 12) colors in a row make for a harmonious color scheme.

Analogous range from green to yellow in this set by Jana Lehmann.

Split complementary colors refer to a color on that is next to a particular color’s complement.

Metal and enamel brooch by Marks Alexander with a blue cyan and its split complementaries of red and yellow

Now, why are these relationships important?

I am going to refer to these color relationships quite a bit when we get to color mixing and color palettes but let’s look at a bit of color mixing as a kind of demonstration. Don’t worry if this doesn’t sink in immediately. We will be going over this in more depth later. I have discovered in teaching that presenting the same thing several times in several different ways, especially over time, can really drive an idea home. So, here’s kind of a taster and then we will look delve into this again in the coming weeks.

Let’s say you’d like to make an olive green. You could just grab a green out of the bin an add a touch of black to it to make it darker and more neutral, right? Well, yes, you could but is it the olive you want? You may find that it still looks awfully, well, green, more like dark leaves than army jacket.

Below is a selectin of olive greens. Hold up the color wheel next to them. I think you’ll see that there is quite a bit of yellow in an olive green. Because of that, if the green you chose to start your color mixing is heavy on the cyan (leans towards blue) it will be hard to get to a satisfactory olive with just black. This is where prepackaged, already mixed, colors can be troublesome to mix with. I think you will find that mixing your own green, cyan and yellow, going heavy on the yellow, and then adding a bit of black will get you a nicer olive green.

If you want to get fancy with the color mixing, you might also try a touch of violet or magenta to “tone” down the color instead of depending wholly on the black to do it.

Now let’s see if things I have been saying are sticking with you. Look at the color wheel and then try to surmise why I suggested violet or magenta. What do you think?

Well, if you remember from last week’s discussion about tones, at mixing a little bit of a complementary color is what gives you a toned down color. So, violet works since it is the complement of a yellow-green but you can also use a color’s split compliments to tone it down which is one of the two reasons I suggested magenta as an option.

Perhaps you’ve put together the reason why this works from my earlier comment about why compliments tone things down. It’s because “toning down” is really all about the addition of the missing primary color that isn’t in the color you’re trying to tone down. Because of that, you can use any color that includes the missing primary, not just the complementary color.

So, a yellow-green has cyan and yellow in it but does not have any magenta in the mix, right? Therefore, you can actually tone it down with anything from orange to that indigo blue you see on the CMY color wheel. But why did I suggest magenta rather than violet? Well, I was thinking that maybe we don’t want to add too much more cyan to that olive green, in order to preserve more of that yellow in the yellow-green hue, and both violet and indigo blue have cyan in it. So, if you add a touch of magenta you, preserve more of the yellow. Of course, if you are yellow-green is yellower than you want, go for violator indigo. That will tone down the yellow a bit.

Here is another question for all you smarty-pants… Why do you think black, as discussed last week, is an option for toning down a color?

The answer is in what black is made of. If remember from way back in the first article in June, with pigments, black is the inclusion of all primary colors. So, if you had black, you are technically adding a missing primary to your color no matter what the color is. Right?

Isn’t it really cool how there is usually some pretty simple underlying reasoning behind all these color rules? Or maybe it’s just me. I always want to know why something works. If I know why I can remember it, use it, and abuse it as needed.

So, are you beginning to see why you would need to be familiar with where colors fall on the color wheel and how their relationships will inform your color mixing choices? Also knowing about these relationships makes remembering things like compliments easier – the complement to a primary is always a secondary and vice versa, and the complement of a tertiary color is always another tertiary. Easy stuff!

Explore Your Favorite Color Relationships

This week, if you want to explore these ideas further, just grab your color wheel (or view it here) and spend some lazy time looking it over and discovering more about how particular colors relate.

For instance, are you surprised the complement to red is cyan and not green? Orange and cyan blue actually are pretty familiar, aren’t they? And that indigo blue on the wheel is not so far off from purple so the purple-yellow complement combination you might have been acquainted with from the RYB color wheel also feels comfortably familiar.

Find a set or two of three analogous colors that have high contrast. Even though they are all next each other on the color wheel, that doesn’t mean they have the same or similar values, nor does it mean that it needs to look basically monochromatic. Can you find some analogous color combinations you like, ones that you might use in an upcoming project?

Find the key hue for some of your favorite color pairs. Are they complements? Or are they more of a split complement? Maybe you are into analogous colors? For instance, one of my favorite combos is royal purple and forest green. Those are violet and green key hues and are therefore a split complement.

Split compliments are actually really great pairings, especially in situations where you want color contrast but maybe not the drama of complete opposites. Identify a few more split complementary pairs on the color wheel that you find appealing.

Okay, I will leave you with this swirl of color information taking over your brain. Keep identifying colors you see around you, naming them as primary, secondary or tertiary colors so that, as we move along, the conversations we have will be easily and quickly grasped. Also, have fun finding color pairs out in the world or while you’re playing at your studio table, and again, identify them, when relevant (because there are other color combinations we haven’t hit on yet), as complementary, analogous, or split complementary. Because, next week, we start getting serious about mixing!

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