Color Talk
Having spent the past few days in the company of all my sisters, my brain has a fresh supply of things to mull over. One of the least significant but most-compelling-in-the-moment matters is color theory and correct color terminology.
It all started with a purple vase full of Mom's orange roses. To be more precise, the color of the vase was a tint of purple and the rose color was a tint of orange. That means that white was added to the base color. The colors are lightened versions of the original, in other words. We all agreed that the combination was beautiful. One of my sisters, however, pronounced those colors as complementary colors, and I felt constrained to set the matter straight. No. Blue is the complement of orange.
This disagreement produced several color wheel drawings, with one of us claiming that purple was opposite orange on the color wheel and the other of us claiming that blue was opposite orange on the color wheel. I explained that colors could not be considered complementary unless a line between them exactly divided the color wheel in half. I think another way of thinking about these colors is to recognize them as having maximum contrast.
In a "don't you hate it when that happens" moment, I couldn't think of the right word for the purple-orange combination. The term I offered was "split-complementary colors," but that wasn't quite right, as it turns out. I know that since this morning when I looked it up online.
When lines drawn between any three colors on the color wheel form a triangle, and each color is equidistant from the other two colors, the color combination comprises a triadic color scheme. Purple, orange, and green make up one triadic color scheme. The three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) make up another triadic color scheme. Many other combinations could be used in a triadic color scheme--as long as lines drawn between the colors on the color wheel form an equilateral triangle.
Split complementary colors start with true complementary colors, but deviate from that pattern by splitting the connecting line into a "y" shape at one end of the line. The ends of the forked lines terminate on either side of the color at the original end of the line. To continue with the orange-blue combination as it is when morphed into a split complementary color scheme, blue can still be one of the colors, but orange is replaced by red-orange and yellow-orange. It could also be orange, and blue-green and blue-violet (splitting on either side of the blue). This website has good examples and explanations of several color schemes.
Warm and cool colors sometimes have different definitions, but the simplest one I found is the one that draws a line straight across the color wheel dividing yellow and yellow-green at one end and red-violet and violet at the other end. The side that includes both red and yellow includes all the warm colors. The cool side has blue near the center of the half-circle. This page has many color wheel diagrams, with some of them showing the warm/cool divisions.
Hue and value and intensity are other color terms we just won't go into at the moment.
I'm especially thinking of color schemes in relation to some landscape planning I'm doing for our front yard. The book my sister Carol gave me as an early birthday present fills a need perfectly. It's called Colors in the Garden by P. Allen Smith. I already have and like the book he wrote about the "garden home."
It all started with a purple vase full of Mom's orange roses. To be more precise, the color of the vase was a tint of purple and the rose color was a tint of orange. That means that white was added to the base color. The colors are lightened versions of the original, in other words. We all agreed that the combination was beautiful. One of my sisters, however, pronounced those colors as complementary colors, and I felt constrained to set the matter straight. No. Blue is the complement of orange.
This disagreement produced several color wheel drawings, with one of us claiming that purple was opposite orange on the color wheel and the other of us claiming that blue was opposite orange on the color wheel. I explained that colors could not be considered complementary unless a line between them exactly divided the color wheel in half. I think another way of thinking about these colors is to recognize them as having maximum contrast.
In a "don't you hate it when that happens" moment, I couldn't think of the right word for the purple-orange combination. The term I offered was "split-complementary colors," but that wasn't quite right, as it turns out. I know that since this morning when I looked it up online.
When lines drawn between any three colors on the color wheel form a triangle, and each color is equidistant from the other two colors, the color combination comprises a triadic color scheme. Purple, orange, and green make up one triadic color scheme. The three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) make up another triadic color scheme. Many other combinations could be used in a triadic color scheme--as long as lines drawn between the colors on the color wheel form an equilateral triangle.
Split complementary colors start with true complementary colors, but deviate from that pattern by splitting the connecting line into a "y" shape at one end of the line. The ends of the forked lines terminate on either side of the color at the original end of the line. To continue with the orange-blue combination as it is when morphed into a split complementary color scheme, blue can still be one of the colors, but orange is replaced by red-orange and yellow-orange. It could also be orange, and blue-green and blue-violet (splitting on either side of the blue). This website has good examples and explanations of several color schemes.
Warm and cool colors sometimes have different definitions, but the simplest one I found is the one that draws a line straight across the color wheel dividing yellow and yellow-green at one end and red-violet and violet at the other end. The side that includes both red and yellow includes all the warm colors. The cool side has blue near the center of the half-circle. This page has many color wheel diagrams, with some of them showing the warm/cool divisions.
Hue and value and intensity are other color terms we just won't go into at the moment.
I'm especially thinking of color schemes in relation to some landscape planning I'm doing for our front yard. The book my sister Carol gave me as an early birthday present fills a need perfectly. It's called Colors in the Garden by P. Allen Smith. I already have and like the book he wrote about the "garden home."
posted by Mrs. I (Miriam Iwashige) at
6:39 AM
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