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Analogous and Complementary colors

© Joe Jeskiewicz

As a student in middle school, grades 5 through 8 where I lived, I learned for the first time about the color wheel from my art teacher. I thought it was great. All the colors so orderly defined and each having its own separate relationship with another. As I grew up and went through school I completely forgot about the color wheel until that first year of college where it was briefly mentioned and stressed and then forgotten again. However, the color wheel should be framed and hanging on the studio of every graphic designer and artist all throughout the world.

There are just some things you cannot deny about the colors. How they interact with one another and help each other out is as important as the content and balance of the image. This is why I assigned two separate exercises about the color wheel to be done back to back. These assignments are analogous and complementary colors. These are just to stretch out designing and creative minds with a little practice with the color wheel.

For the uninitiated, analogous colors are colors found right beside one another on the color wheel. For instance, Yellow-Green, Green, and Blue-Green or Red, Red-Orange, and Orange. Of course the color wheel can be stretched and shrunk to give a wider variety or more minimal variety of colors, i.e. Red, Orange, and Yellow. Complementary Colors, on the other hand, are colors that are directly opposite from one another on the color wheel, such as Purple and Yellow or Blue and Orange. There are more complex relationships with colors than these two simple ones but any color relationship can be fun to explore.

In doing this exercise instead of portraying some actual thing such as a hand or tree using these color combinations I have decided to take inspiration from Koichi Sato and his Dazzling Designs Coloring Book. Sato has very geometric 3D spatial designs. Boxes and cubes and lines that all overlap, and so in this manner I designed a set of 10 boxes in which the lines that make up the boxes overlap and create myriad shapes in which to apply various colors. You can see the results of my efforts below.

This design is by far not so complex or involved as any of Sato's designs but it does offer ample opportunity to arrange colors and try different combinations relatively quickly. The piece you see above is of analogous colors. I chose three colors that had some variation to them - Red, Orange, and Yellow. To me, the warmer color relationships seem to be very close visually when using a smaller range such as Orange, Red-Orange, and Red, so I took out the tertiary colors from the color wheel to make my selection. Below you can see my piece of complements -Yellow and Purple. In my mind this is a more successful piece because the simplicity of color matches the simplicity of design. On a whole it is more balanced and thus more sustaining.

Color Wheel

Analogous

Complementary

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