Experiencing Joy Through Art

   Hello again everyone! I hope this Wednesday morning finds you well. In one of my previous posts I discussed how to use complementary colors to enhance your room décor or fashion. As we continue to explore the range of possiblities, we run across a number of variations on this theme. One of them is known as “split complementaries”.

   As before, I've explained that a color's complement is its “opposite”. This can be thought of in a more literal sense if you arrange the colors on an artist’s color wheel. That way not only are complements opposite in the abstract visual sense, but also are actually opposite each other on the color wheel. In the diagram below we can see how red is opposite green, blue opposite orange and so on. 

   Red, Yellow and Blue are known as primary colors. Their mixtures; Orange, Green and Violet are known as secondary colors. For split complementaries we need to flesh out this color wheel a bit and add in the tertiary colors. These are those colors between the primary and secondary colors. 

   The diagram below shows a full color wheel with the tertiary colors included and the arrows point to the split complementaries of red. Simply stated a split complementary is the two tertiary colors on either side of a color's complement. So in this example, starting with red, instead of using green to accent it we would use yellow-green and blue-green and leave the straight green out. 

   As with any color scheme or decorating plan, you want to avoid using all high-saturated bright colors in most cases. The three squares below the color wheel show an example of how you might use a split complementary palette of colors in a real-world application. I have tinted out the red to make it lighter and added gray to the blue-green and yellow-green to tone them down a bit. You can do this for any color you like. If you started with violet, then the split complementaries would be yellow-green and yellow-orange. Just start with any color, find its direct opposite and choose the colors one step to the right and one step to the left of that. It offers a quick and easy way to give your décor some variation! 

   In my painting “Sentinels”, there is a split complementary color scheme as yellow-orange light tones play off of the blues and violets of the shadows. This painting would work perfectly in a room with a blue-violet or yellow-orange theme.