• Making Color Work for You
    Awake!—1976 | October 8

    • The “Color Wheel” and “Color Triangle”

      The primary, secondary and intermediate colors mentioned above amount to twelve. Many have found it practical to arrange these into a color wheel patterned after the face of a clock. First, place the primary colors at an equal distance from one another. If you put yellow at 12 o’clock, then red could appear at 4 o’clock and blue at 8 o’clock. Inserting the secondary colors between the primaries would result in orange at 2 o’clock, violet at 6 o’clock and green at 10 o’clock. Filling the remaining six spaces with the intermediate colors results in a color wheel such as that shown on the previous page.

      But where do the many browns and beiges find accommodation in this color system? They fall inside the color wheel. If you mix all three primaries (or, if you prefer, the secondaries) in carefully controlled proportions you can get infinite varieties of olive-greens, light and dark browns and beiges.

      How can this device assist you to harmonize colors? Often pleasing results come from using complementary colors. These are located opposite each other in the color wheel. Thus, you may find that red goes well with green, blue with orange, yellow with violet, and so forth. Some have worked out excellent four-color schemes by combining two sets of complements. However, finding a satisfying color scheme has much to do with your individual personality. What delights one person may clash in the opinion of another.

      Quite often a color goes well with the two on either side of its complement. For example, blue combines pleasingly with yellow-orange and red-orange. Another fine arrangement is a triad, made up of colors spaced equally from one another. Combinations such as blue-green, yellow-orange and red-violet, as well as the primary colors, red, yellow and blue, are examples of triads.

      Pleasant, too, is the use of adjacent colors, that is, those next to one another on the color wheel. For instance, you will find that yellow, yellow-green and yellow-orange blend nicely, as do violet, blue-violet and red-violet. Another interesting method is known as a mutual complement. This combines five adjacent colors with the complement of the middle one. If, for example, you chose as adjacent colors green, yellow-green, yellow, yellow-orange and orange, the sixth color would be violet, the complement of the middle one (in this case yellow).