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Color Study 6: Triadic / Secondaries
Hi all! Thanks so much to all of you who are surfing in to read these “lessons” on color….you give me confidence that maybe I am on the right track! I was going to include a discussion on warm versus cool colors in this post, but decided to make it into two posts tonight. So for our first installment:
You’ll recall that primaries, red, yellow and blue, are colors that can’t be created by mixing something else. Secondaries, however, CAN be mixed from equal amounts of the primary colors….and I’ll bet every single one of you remembers mixing tempera paints in your first years in school:
Yellow plus Red makes Orange
Red plus Blue makes Violet (aka Purple)
Blue plus Yellow makes Green
And if you mix them all together, you don’t get black… you get that lovely shade known to artists and fingerpainters the world around: mud!
Here’s the colorblock side of the quiltlet, once again with the equilateral triangle to denote a “tri” / triadic color scheme:
In most western cultures, these secondary colors (and then the tertiaries, the ones that are blends of the secondaries and primaries, and their muted or paled versions…such as burgundy and pink are variations on red) are often perceived as more “sophisticated” or “grown-up” than the primaries. All I know is that I found it MUCH easier to work with these three colors and create a pleasing composition than I did the red-yellow-blue combination. Here’s the “quilt” side, again an effort at abstract using a diagonal composition (although honestly I think of this as treetrunks on the crest of a hill!), mixing in gray among the vertical bits
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As in earlier quilts, since I’m working from my stash to make these pieces, it was virtually impossible to create something without a bit of “other” colors creeping in…there is a bit of blue in the green fabric in the upper right, there are some caramel browns in the purple. But I figure that makes it a more true-to-real world experience, right?