Frederic Church - Twilight in the Wilderness 1860
Orange? Yellow? It depends?
There are two Holy Grails in color study. Perfect primaries and exact complements. After years of searching for both, I have come to the conclusion that perfect primaries do not exist and exact complements do not matter.
Expand the range of the traditional pairs and you have a good enough guide:
Blue-Orange = Any color from Cyan to Blue Violet and any color from Yellow to Red-Orange.
Red-Green = Any color from Magenta to Red-Orange and any color from Blue-Green to Yellow-Green.
Yellow-Purple – Any color from Yellow Green to Orange Yellow and any color from Blue-Violet to Red Violet.
Cheers! I think the not quite precise colors are much more fun.
Thank you. Coming from someone I consider one of the most knowledgeable people about color, this post is a breath of fresh air. Brought up in the old ‘red-yellow-blue are primaries’ classes, just letting go of that has been a struggle. There’s been so much struggle to find ‘correct’ color matches or compliments. Yet I see so many colorful works that appear to not follow rules. Hooray for relaxed rules, and making them guidelines!