The idea of a color scheme always makes me think of interior decorating, and, if you use a search engine for “color schemes,” you will mostly get decorating tips. But there is a literature on color schemes for paintings as well which has become codified and consistent in their advice. The dominant idea is “harmony”, harmonious colors, and the basis of this harmony is usually based on complementary colors. Color choice, of course, is ultimately a palette issue, so I take it up here although I feel it is not very useful. All color schemes have just a few colors (paints), so they are basically very limited palette paintings if followed to the letter.
As with every other issue in composition, the basic idea is not to have any intervals or proportions equal. This means that whatever the color scheme you do not want equal amounts of your color choices in watercolors or decorating your living room. There should be lots of one color and little bits of the others.
The first problem with this approach is that the complements being discussed are almost always the “mixing” complements, those that make gray, rather than the visual complements. (Red against Green, Blue against Orange, and Yellow against Violet all make gray.) This is simply wrong when applied to the look of the color in our painting. If we are trying to determine the effect on one color on another, we are talking about reflected colored light coming back to us from a surface not about mixing paints. For example Blue and Orange are mixing complements. We mix them to get desaturation in both colors which in the ultimate mixture produces gray. However it is Blue and Yellow that are visual complements. This means that to get a gray mix blue and orange, but to make blue pop out (to enhance the color), you should use blue and yellow side by side. (Yellow will also be more intense.) The visual complements are found by looking at the color of the after-image.
The visual complements are:
Blue Yellow (not orange)
Green Magenta (not red)
Red Cyan (not green)
Hillary Page has a detailed post on the subject of visual complements here, and I’ve discussed it elsewhere. THIS SEEMS TO ME TO BE A CRITICAL MISTAKE IN THE LITERATURE OF COLOR SCHEMES.
The general idea of color schemes seems to be that there are going to be passages of the colors chosen for the scheme in the painting. For example, if your color scheme is “primary colors”, then you are going to have red, yellow, and blue passages in the painting unmixed. Generally a primary color palette is thought of as palette choices which are going to be mixed to create a whole gamut of colors, for example orange from the yellow and red, but including orange would mean another color scheme. (Actually you can not mix all the prismatic colors from the so-called primaries as I have discuss in the post about primary color palettes). Does this mean that, if I choose a primary colors scheme, I must use only three colors in my painting? That might work for choosing the colors for the living room walls and the sofa, but it doesn’t work for painting.
So I am confused about the relevance of color schemes as usually presented.
If you want to explore the details of color schemes here is a website.
There is a very nice computerized color color scheme maker here.
I think a much better idea is available on Handprint here where actual palettes are discussed, diagrammed and painting looked at done with them.
HOWEVER, an interesting side light on color schemes is the use of a kalideoscope which breaks the image up into pieces, and you can generally see spots of color better and get an idea of what colors and in what proportions are in the subject being view. You cannot identify objects. I have a small one which sometime surprises me. I looked at my studio through it and was surprised to see how some red objects popped out from the generally gray background. I think this sort of a thing might be useful.
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