Understanding Colour: Complementary Colours

The first step in this exercise was to construct a colour wheel like that of Chevreul and to identify the complementary colours. Unfortunately I ran out of the Winsor and Newton primary yellow when mixing my yellow-green and had to use the lower quality Rowney paint. I think you can clearly see the difference in quality in terms of coverage - the Rowney paint contains more filler and less pigment. I have ordered some more of the Winsor and Newton Designer's gouache.

Next, samples of complementary colours were placed alongside each other on a neutral grey background. Whit had been added to the darker of each pair to try to make the tonal values more similar. These colours were then mixed together and then more white added. The next task is to attempt to describe the resulting colours. This might sound simple but is actually a difficult task because of the lack of a very extensive and precise standard vocabulary for the description of colours. The mixture of these colours was also fairly haphazard - mixing different proportions of each colour in each case would result in different tertiary or broken colours. also the different strength of pigments in the different quality paints may have altered the results. 

Orange + Blue gave a muddy olive or lovat green which appeared brighter when mixed with more white - like a mint green but with more yellow overtones

Red + Green gave a very dark tone which read as almost black but could be seen to contain a hint of red. On mixing more white into this the result was a slightly purplish grey. This appeared to me to be the closest to achromatic of all the greys I produced in this exercise.

Red Orange + Blue Green produced a dark khaki which when mixed with white produced a sage green.

Yellow Green + Red Purple produced a cool dark brown. Mixing additional white into this  gave a pinkish clay-coloured taupe.

Yellow Orange + Purple Blue gave a muddy yellow-green somewhere between mustard yellow and olive green. The addition of white produced a yellowish cream. 

Yellow + Purple produced a surprisingly bright sunshine yellow (perhaps the proportion of yellow was too high in this mix to dull the chroma). I added a bit more purple which produced a dull but warm peach colour.

Describing these colours has been very difficult and I do not think it would be possible for another person to reproduce these colours accurately from my descriptions - this is a clear illustration of the difficulties with colour vocabulary and shows why many paint manufacturers resort to numbers to categorise colours. 

I played around with some of the
leftover colours to see what placing
them in various combinations would do.