Color Notes: Using Color

The most important thing to remember is that every aspect of color is in a relationship with every other color around it.

• Place chroma in good relationships with neutrals.
• Our world is mostly neutral.
• Do no fall for cliche color rules.
• Weather, season, and time of day can all be represented by shifts in value and chroma.
• Paint the atmosphere and air around your subject rather than the subject itself.
• Learn to see color so that you can let go of rules and follow your natural intuition.
• Move the viewer through your painting not only with line and shape, but also with color.
• Form or accent can be made by shifting warms and cools rather than light and dark.

A Few Traditional Color Schemes

• Analogous – colors that are next to each other on the color wheel such as red, red-violet, and violet.
• Complementary – colors that are directly across from each other on the color wheel such as green and red.
• Split complementary – colors that are on either side of a color’s direct complement such as yellow, blue violet, and red violet.
• Triadic – three colors that are spaced more or less evenly around the color wheel such as red, blue, and yellow.
• Monochromatic – one color, varying only its intensity and value.

The image posted here is an example of a triadic color scheme.