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!