Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, welcome to my new mini series. We're going to be talking about how to improve your art.
Today, specifically, color combinations. To start off with, we'll talk about the analagous scheme. And so what that is, is it's any colors
on the color wheel that are next to each other. So what I've chosen are the colors from blue
to yellow, and everything in between there. So, you can see in this one, we've got a blue
sky, blue mountains, green trees, and most of the yellow is in the ground. And then another
thing you might notice is there's quite a bit of red and browns in there as well. The
truth - you're never really going to get too pure of a color scheme, and if you do, chances
are it could be very boring. So don't limit yourself just too much, but think of the color
scheme as a way to promote harmony in your painting. So, for instance, the analgous color
scheme works very well when you're trying to create one solidified mood. It could be
a calming mood using blues, yellows, and greens. It could be an intense mood such as with a
fiery sunset. It coudl be something even a little more melancholy if you went jsut towards
the blues and a couple purples. Let's move on here. We're going to go back to our color
wheel and explode out the next scheme. The complimentary scheme starts off with two colors,
opposite each other on the color wheel. I've chosen green and red. I want to extend this
a little bit, so I'm also going to use the colors right next to my complimentary colors.
basically, what I get is a split complimentary scheme. Th advantage of this is it doesn't
limit me to just two colors it allows me a full range. What you see when you look at
this painting is primarily muted green, browns, and reds. In the background is some purple
and that's where it's important to have additional colors added. But what you don't see is a
strong puyrple. We've taken that color out and we're focusing on red versus green, and
there's also yellow in there. Without all those colors, it woldn't be as strong as it
is. If these colors go back down to the color wheel, once again we can pick a different
scheme. This time what I want to look at is the monochromatic scheme. So if I pull up
my blue, I can get anything from a dark value to a light value. A foggy seascape or a night
scene might be very well suited for a monochromatic scheme. In this painting, you can see lots
of purples, blues. blacks, some turqoise, and even up in the sky, some grays which compared
to the blues looks warm. Which brings up a very important point When you're painting
with a color scheme, you want to think in terms of warm and cool colors. Any time you
can layer warm and cool colors, you create a more vibrant scene. In the sky, we have
cool grays against warm greys. in the background rocks we have warm grays against the cool
gray foreground. What you get with the monochromatic scheme is something with highly intense detail
that is focused on shapoes, primarily. because you are talking about value contrast. You're
no longer talking about colors, you're talking about how do the shapes become rendered, and
how do we identify what is that shape. The last one I want to talk about is the prismatic
scheme, which includes all colors. You'll see that usually, you're loooking for a prismatic
scene that is biased towards another scheme. You don't ever want to limit yourself too
much. Happy Painting!