This can be a great asset, particularly in pictures like landcape scenes, which always seem to include trees. To make the trees look as if they are receding, you could paint them in green and blue. However, should you be using colours that are, in fact, opposite to each other in the circle, these are called complimentary colours.
So, if you place them side by side, one works against another to dominate the space you have. This is very effective when you want to produce contrast and vibrant colours to your work.
Something to remember is the light reflects everything we see in colour around us. To the average person they probably see, say, brown as brown, red as red, but it does not have to be like this.
No two skies are the same and just look how many shades of colour they may contain. The same applies to the seas with the different greens, blues and sometimes they even look black, depending on the light.
Take a rainbow when the sunlight goes through the raindrops, this is when you get the spectrum. So, if you put these colours into a ring, you have a colour wheel. So, let`s move to colour mixing!
The pure colours, known as the primary colours, are red, yellow and blue, and these cannot be mixed from any other colours. The secondary colours being orange, green and violet, simply because the consistency is made up from an equal mixture of their two primary colour neighbours in the circle.
This can now be extended by joining any of the main primary colours, with whichever you may choose, from the secondary colours. Try mixing blue and green and you come up with turquoise. Interestingly enough, the majority of paints you buy are named after flowers and gems.
As you may have come to the realisation, the wheel does not include black and white. In essence, when the light shines on to something it soaks up part of its wavelengths, this results in some coming back to make up the colour we are seeing.
Black, if you like, extracts them all and then white throws them back again. Therefore, black vanishes and white is a mix of all the colours.
If you take brown as an example. Mix the primaries together and see how many shades you get.
By now you must surely agree that colours are vital to our work. I think it is fantastic that they can be used to portray so many things. Emotions, space, realism, excitement, just some things that come to mind. However, they can also be vibrant, dull, opaque, impasto, textured, matt, gloss, flat translucent, light or dark.
