Color Contrast In Art Composition

Some of us have learned the color wheel and the color complements in our elementary schooling. There is the color wheel too, that goes a long way.

Hidden among this colors is a tool or a technique - the use of color contrasts - to make good compositions for artworks, and there by making good artworks.

Being a reader of All Strage Hours, I read about Color and Color Mixing by David.

He talks about the Munsell Complements. They are a little different from what we derive from the color wheel:

• Yellow - Purple Blue
• Yellow Red — Blue
• Green — Red Purple
• Blue Green — Red
• Blue — Yellow Red

These are visual complements. These complements are based on how the human eye perceives the color.

The color complements are something we need start planning for, from the very beginning of an artwork. That way, as you illustrate/paint the subsequent layers, they follow the color palette laid down, and the resulting artwork has good color complements.

Compose the color palette in phase one it self, and block out the colors as flat colors. After that, no matter how many layers you paint over it, try and maintain the same hue range.

It is not that you should not put any detail of any other color, but the bulk or the form of the painting should have the major colors that complement each other. For example, in this painting, if I intended to paint some vegetation, I would have kept it a minimum. On the other had, if I wanted to fill all the cliff with more vegetation and less of the earth showing, I would have painted the vegetation - the trees, shrubs and grass, to have a more yellow green range. And along with that, I would have worked chosen a sky color that is more tending towards red or purple.

Color contrast is one of the avenues where you can take artistic licenses to create a more pleasing and dramatic artwork, where pure reproduction of real colors might result in a dull painting due to poor contrasts.

That said, I am yet to get comfortable with the choice of colors - that is, in choosing the base palette for an artwork. This is something that will require some study, and a lot more experimentation.