Secrets of color harmony - #1

Knights Valley Trees and Vineyards (untitled as of yet), about 8"x10"

© 2010 Karen Lynn Ingalls

Start with a limited palette

The simplest way to create color harmony is to begin with a limited palette. How limited? All you need is one yellow, one red, one blue, and white.

With those colors, you'll be able to mix oranges, purples, greens, and most everything in between. How those mixes differ depend on which yellow, which red, which blue, and which white you choose.

Your three colors, with white, become like a family. Whatever you mix with them comes from them – as I'm fond of saying, all those mixes have the same DNA. They are related. Hence – color harmony.

Now, say you're painting the image of a tree, and instead of mixing your yellow and blue, you pull out a separate tube of green for its leaves. You'll find it doesn't fit in with its surroundings. It's not related. It doesn't have the same DNA as the colors around it.

When you've worked with your three colors for awhile, and know well what you can do with them, you will also learn what you can't do with them. Maybe your red and blue make a plummy brown instead of a vibrant purple. Maybe your blue and yellow don't give you the brilliant spring green you're looking for. Don't feel stuck – that's when it's time to add in a new color. (Only one color at a time works best, so you really get to know all of the new possibilities now open to you.)

Note: In the little painting above, I used primary magenta, primary cyan, a light yellow ( a mixing, or printer's, palette), and Titanium white.

Color wheels

This is the standard color wheel, with Yellow, Red, and Blue as the primary colors. No doubt you remember from elementary school that mixing yellow and red makes orange, mixing red and blue makes purple, and mixing blue and yellow makes green....

Colors opposite each other on the color wheel are called complementary colors (not because they compliment each other). When you mix complementary colors, they make neutrals (browns and grays). And when you put them side by side in a painting, they create color contrast that draws our eyes.

Yellow and purple (or violet) have the greatest contrast in value, followed by orange and blue. Red and green are closest in value of the complementary colors. (So what's with the arrows in the diagram above? Oh, well.)

The mixing palette, or printer's palette, used by professional printers as well as your inkjet printer, has different primary colors, and mixes differently. The yellow is a little lighter, the red is not red but magenta, and the blue is the warm and turquoisey cyan. Here, yellow and cyan still mix to make green. Cyan and magenta make purple. But to get a true red, you mix yellow and magenta. To get orange, you use a little more yellow and a little less magenta. And notice how they all mix together to approximate black?

How your colors mix will depend on the colors you choose to work with, but they will look something like one of these two color wheels. Why does this matter? And how does this apply to creating a painting? That's a whole 'nother bunch of posts....