The Artist's Road Painting the World's Beautiful Places

With Our Complements

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Still Life with Roses and Sunflowers     1886     Vincent van Gogh

   In order to understand how to deliberately employ color to achieve an artistic effect requires an intimate knowledge of color itself and above all, color relationships. Any color placed next to another of equal size or mass, will affect how the eye sees and the brain interprets both colors. This principle is thoroughly illustrated in the Josef Albers book, Interaction of Color, which should be in every artist’s collection. Simply change just the mass relationship, where there is more of one color adjacent to another, and the perception of those colors magically changes. They often don’t even look like the same colors sitting on the palette! It is so important that this effect is thoroughly understood before it can be adapted to suit our purposes. Understood or not, with every stroke, it is happening anyway in our paintings, so it is best to absorb these principles up front. Things get very much more complex when we also change the value or temperature of a color along with the size of our color mass. So many factors to consider!

   One of the simplest skills to undertake is that of using color complements to affect our color perceptions. Looking at a color wheel, a complementary color is the color on the opposite side of the wheel from any other color. in the pure primary colors, the complements are mixed secondary colors. A secondary is made from two primaries, so the complement of red is green, of yellow, violet, of blue, orange. Placing equal masses of two complements together creates a color “vibration”. The interaction causes our perception to get very excited to the point where the colors seem to move on the canvas. And if one closes one’s eyes, the colors appear to still be visible on our eyelid interiors. Powerful indeed. Add just a bit of complement to its larger opposite, and more magic happens. The combination livens up the larger color mass, kind of how a little salt makes most food taste more interesting. Now we’re getting somewhere! These principles were well-known to the Impressionists, who experimented relentlessly and opened the world’s eyes to a new way of appreciating color and atmosphere in contemporary painting. We can make our own paintings come alive by using carefully adjusted complements to add interest and life to our work.

   The next, more advanced technique of managing color relationships is to learn how to mix grays from complements. For any painting subject, knowing how to tone down, liven up or energize a given color mix with another complementary mix is an extremely useful and valuable skill to own. Check out our illustrated and detailed article on this subject in The Artist’s Road: Mixing Colorful Grays in Oil. This skill allows one to create any color relationship desired—even an imagined one. No longer tethered to the colors inherent in a live subject, one is free to express with confidence one’s creative intentions and dreams directly in the work. It is the ultimate goal of the long and fascinating road to learning how to paint.