Exploring Secondary Colours, Tints and Shades
Senior 2 · Fine Arts
Exploring Secondary Colours, Tints and Shades
Lesson 4 of 4
22 min
You see a poster from across the street before you can read it. Its colours have already told you something: loud and exciting, or calm and serious. Designers of wedding invitations, football kits, bank logos and campaign posters choose colours for exactly this reason. In this lesson you will learn to choose colours that create a mood (the feeling of a work) and that look good together, which is called colour harmony.
Split the colour wheel in half. Warm colours, red, orange and yellow, remind us of fire and sunshine; they feel energetic, exciting or joyful, and they seem to come towards the viewer. Cool colours, blue, green and violet, remind us of water, shade and leaves; they feel calm, quiet or sometimes sad, and they seem to move away. Notice that two of the secondaries are cool (green and violet) and one is warm (orange).
Meanings of colour are partly learned, so they change from one culture to another. Rwanda's national flag, adopted in 2001, is a good example of colours chosen for meaning: blue stands for happiness and peace, yellow for economic development, and green for the hope of prosperity, with a golden sun for enlightenment. When you design for an audience, think about what your colours will mean to them.
Gatete must design two posters. Poster A announces a school football final. He wants excitement, so he chooses a complementary pair, orange and blue, with orange for the headline because warm colours come forward. Poster B invites families to a quiet evening of remembrance and unity. He chooses a monochromatic scheme of calm blue-violet tints and shades with plenty of empty space. Same designer, same wheel, opposite moods, because he started from the feeling he wanted and chose the scheme to match.
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) painted his bedroom in Arles, France, three times. This is the second version, painted in 1889. In a letter to his brother Theo about the first version, he explained that the colour was meant to suggest rest and sleep. Find the complementary pairs he used: the yellow-orange bed and chairs against the blue-violet walls, and the red blanket against the green window and the green touches in the floor. The strong complements make the room lively, while the simple shapes and the empty space keep it restful. Do you find it calm?
Colour and feeling have interested thinkers for centuries. The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe painted the colour circle below in 1809 and wrote a quality of the mind beside each colour; for example, the red segment carries the word schön (beautiful). His meanings were personal, but the idea that colours carry moods is the same one designers use today.
Tip
Complements are "opposites that attract". Every primary is opposite the secondary it is not part of: red–green, yellow–violet, blue–orange. In the exam, start from the mood the brief asks for, then choose the scheme that fits it.
Give the complementary colour of each secondary: orange, green, violet.
Solution: orange–blue, green–red, violet–yellow. Each secondary's complement is the primary it does not contain.
Name the colour scheme: a painting that uses only dark green, green and pale green.
Solution: monochromatic, one hue with its shades and tints.
A clinic wants a waiting-room mural that helps patients feel calm. Recommend a scheme and explain.
Solution: a cool analogous scheme (for example blue-green, green and yellow-green) in soft tints and tones. Cool colours feel calm and seem to recede, and analogous colours sit together without strong contrast.
What happens if you mix a colour with its complement? When is that useful?
Solution: the colours dull each other towards brown or grey. It is useful for darkening or softening a colour without using black, for example adding a touch of red to make a natural, shadowy green.
Remember
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