Hey. I am Jake.
Welcome to the Fireside Tattoo Network.
On this show, we talk really often about using
a limited color palette in your paintings and also in your tattooing.
I thought today I would give a quick tip on how to use complementaries
in a limited palette to achieve a huge spectrum of muted tones.
A lot of times we'll get questions about what color palette we're using, say,
in some of these painterly, floral pieces that I've been posting a lot of.
And people think that we're pulling a lot of muted colors directly
out of the tube, but in fact, we're using only really high key, bright colors,
but using them in a way that we get an infinite number of
of subtle off tones and any value that you can imagine.
So let's check it out.
All right, so I'm just going to grab two random complementary colors.
We're going to go with, say, yellow and purple.
So let's let's imagine a scenario here
where we are tattooing a sunflower right?
We're tattooing kind of a realistic sunflower,
and it's sitting on a three quarter view.
So as the petals come out and they're in the foreground,
they're in the light, we're looking for a really vibrant light and bright yellow.
And as they recede, we want them to neutralize and darken
because high key colors come towards us and neutral colors recede.
So what we see a lot of people do
is they work with their yellow
and they get all their foreground petals in place.
And then as they move backwards, they feel like they need to darken.
And so they'll go to black and look what happens whenever I go to black
It turns green.
So I might not necessarily want green as I move back through these petals.
Maybe I have some greens in another area and I'm trying to avoid those or
or maybe I just want to neutralize this bright color.
And I don't want to really change color altogether.
So what I might do instead
is from my yellow
I might hit this purple, which is the complement of yellow.
Let's see what happens whenever I bump into the purple
that yellow doesn't turn green.
It keeps its chroma, but it neutralizes it doesn't really gray.
It just neutralizes.
So what that does is if this is less intense than this
from a value standpoint, this doesn't really get much darker.
And the reason for that is because I chose a light purple, a purple
that isn't too much darker on the gray scale than this kind of medium yellow.
Now, let's say I did want to go darker than this.
Let's say there are some shadow petals.
I could do the same thing, but rather than go into my light
purple, I might bump into a slightly darker purple.
And it doesn't take a lot of this.
It'll really overwhelm your yellow pretty quickly if you're not careful
so you have to come back and then let's see what happens.
We've done the same thing.
We've just gone a little bit darker.
It didn't turn green.
It didn't do what it did with the black.
It just simply neutralized.
So I'm not saying that you can't use black or white
to darken or lighten a color.
What I am saying is that you probably shouldn't only use black or white.
So let's say I get it to this point and I've got this neutral color.
If I still am not quite dark enough, I can touch that black.
And I've already manipulated this color enough.
I've neutralized it enough with that purple
that the black isn't going to overwhelmingly green it out.
So say that I've done
this with our purple
I've got it a little darker.
At some point
it'll start to shift more to purple, and you may not want it
to go across the yellow spectrum and go into purple.
So at that point you might slightly touch your black and then darken from there
so you can slowly creep it darker with black or creep it lighter with white.
But you don't want to rely on those primarily
to neutralize that color as it recedes into the distance.
So another and you can do this with any complimentary,
you could do it with blue and orange, you could do it with reds and greens
Just think, when I want to neutralize a color I'm going to look
first to, it's complimentary.
Then I'm going to ask, do
I want it to go darker and more neutral or lighter and more neutral?
Or stay about the same value and more neutral?
And that'll determine whether I go with a dark
purple, medium, purple or light, purple or whatever the complementary might be.
So that's it. I hope that helps. We'll see you next time.