Now then, I've been mentioning colour theory a little bit over the last few days, so I thought I'd do a post explaining at least the basics of it.
Now then, as you can see, this colour theory is based on an RYB (Red Yellow Blue) colour wheel. Red, Yellow and Blue being the primary colours, are the largest circles, the second largest you get by mixing the primaries and are therefore called secondary colours (Green, Purple, Violet, Dark Orange and Yellow-Orange). The smallest circles, are tertiary colours and you get those by mixing either primaries or secondaries.
Colour theory is a method of choosing colours that look good with each other, and more importantly, a way of avoiding colours that do not look good together. There are various ways of choosing harmonious colours, which I've shown in the image.
Basic complimentary colours are those that are directly opposite each other on the wheel, these are extremely high contrast. It is important to remember that even though the colours do compliment each other you do not have to ensure that the colours are used in equal amounts, rather choose one main colour and use the other to compliment it, for example in details or lighting etc. You can also use another pair of complimentary colours, as long as they are within 2 spaces of the currently used colours (Analogous).
Split complimentary colours are very similar, except instead of picking colours directly opposite, you choose one colour and then the 2 colours either side of the colour directly opposite (see image). You can choose any of the colours as your main colour in your scheme, and again, they do not have to be equally balanced.
The analogous colour scheme uses 3 touching colours on the colour wheel, they are therefore very low in contrast. This is often used when a specific colour is wanted to dominate a theme, the analogous colours can be used to to pick out details etc without distracting too much from the main colour. Commonly used in the design stage of characters and sets etc.
The tertiary colour scheme (my personal favourite) uses 3 colours equally spaced around the colour wheel (6 colours apart). This is much less colour restrictive than the other schemes as all 3 colours are so different. Again, often used in the design stages of characters and sets, when a dominating colour is not in the brief.
An important note, colours such as pastels that are lowly saturated (all near neutral colours), do not necessarily need to adhere to colour theory and can be used freely with each other.e
Here is a .png version of the colour wheel, you can import this into your drawing application to quickly pick up colours from.
On another note, I took a better look at my use of blog labels, noticing that they are not used as search tags as on other sites, rather a way to categorize your posts. I've had a little clean up of my labels, so you can now use the labels box at the top right to view posts that you're interested in seeing!
Until next time! Mat
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