• Special message Beginning on Monday, we will offer some special holiday deals on our lessons and courses. We
will be informing you about these with emails. Stay tuned! On our color wheel, tertiaries are those mixtures of a primary and a secondary. Whereas we have only three primary hues and three secondary hues, we have six tertiaries. These tertiary hues have a characteristic that neither the primary nor the secondary hues have--their complimentary pairs have a single hue in common as well as two sets of complements. Look at the illustration below: The first diagram shows the tertiary complementary pair red violet and yellow green. Both contain blue, BUT within this pair lives the red/green complement AND the
yellow/violet complement. In the second row, red orange/blue green, both hues contain yellow, BUT both the red/green complementary pair and the blue/orange complementary pair are present. And in the third row, red lives in both yellow orange and blue violet, BUT so do the complementary pairs of blue/orange and yellow/violet. Like all compliments, tertiaries do neutralize each other, but the neutral will lean towards the hue both have in common. Notice how the two pairs with a warm hue in common produce a warm neutral, and the one with the cool hue in common yields a cool neutral. WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOU, THE PAINTER! Don't try to memorize this stuff! All the above is empty color theory unless you work with it as a painter. Memorizing color theory means
nothing and is a waste of time. But when you get your paints out and begin to experiment, mixing according to how color behaves, you discover endless potential for your own work. That is not theory. That's color working! Enjoy a colorful weekend! During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
You can access the archive of all my newsletters (as well as the Quick Tips and other stuff) at any time by going HERE.
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