[drunken_muse]

Hi, I'm sorry to bother you with this question, it's about the concept of complementary colours.

Learning about it from studying photography it always strikes me confused each time I hear people talk about colourwheels & complementary colours in the artworld, since they don't seem to use the same wheels.

In the artworld, people use wheels that tells orange as a complementary colour of blue, while the wheel of people working with photography tells the complementary colour of blue as yellow (orange would be saturated blue instead of full blue). Artwheel says red / green, photowheel says red / cyan. A complementary colour is usually refered to as the colour which contains the least (or none) of it's complementary colour, which should also mean that a complementary colour is the same thing as an inverted one (inverted as, for an example, in photoshop).

Somewhere in the back of my head I have this ghostly memory of Goethe and multiple schools, but I can't seem to recall it.

Can anyone sort this out without refering me to a book?


NOTE: This is not a post about how complementary colours are used, but a question about the basic colourwheel & complemetary colours in general.

[watmough]

blue and orange are complements in terms of pigments(where mixing all the colours give you,supposedly,black)and blue and yellow are complements in terms of light(where mixing all of the colours of the spectrum give you white)the former is for painting and such,and the latter is for photography,monitor screen,etc...

[Les Watters]

Complemetary Colors are based on the after image. If you stare at a color on a white sheet of paper you will see the after image of the exact opposite color. (See The American Flag by Jasper Johns. He painted it in the exact complements to the red white and blue. Orange Green and black, you stare at it for about a minuet and then look at a plain white canvase and you see the flag in its proper colors Red, White and blue.) The whole idea of complementary colors is that they "mutualy intensify each other without changing the aparent cast." This means that if you use the complements of say red and green, the after image of the red is green, and the after image of green is red. They mutially intensify each other. the part about "changing the aparent cast" means, if you use the exact compliments you will not introduce another color into the mix. The after image is a different color say if you use a blue green, the after image of blue green is orange red. In this case it might not hurt your pictue, it just might warm it up a bit. If you use disconcorded colors you may end up with an after image color that has an ugly result. When using complementary colors it is always a good idea to minimize one of the colors to a small amount on the canvase. Preferably the warm color. If you don't do this you will get an effect that kind of blurrs the eye because the simultainous contrast is to high and your picture will be very diffucult to look at. It may even be a physical pain in the eye. you get the same result when you put black and white lines close together. The human eye see's more warm colors than cool ones so minimizing the warm color is better, allowing the cool color to be dominant and a back ground element. Another thing to think about is using the cool color as the small forground element. This some times will give the effect that your picture has a hole in it. This is based on the colorist theory of "Warm Color Advances and Cool Colors Receed." This idea was implimented by the Impressionists and it is a trueisum. The other area to think about is natural order. Some colors are naturally a lighter value, and some are naturally a darker value. Yellow sits naturaly at a value 2 on a nine step value scale and violet sits at about a value 6.5 on a nine step scale. (1 being white and 9 being black)

You can read all about this in Faaber Birrens "Principles of Color".

This is based on how your your eye works. If you have normal vision this physical fact will happen in every normal eye in any person. It's pure science.

Hope this helped you out.
_________________
When in doubt, black it out.

Wally Wood

[drunken_muse]

watmough : Thanks for clearing it up a little.. but it's still a little hazy. When you write pigments you're refering to traditional mediums I figure, so then when painting digitally that isn't really necessary taking into account?

(I'll read "supposedly black" as brown, as I never gotten black mixing traditionally. :)

Les Watters : Heh, now you did exactly what I asked you not to do in the note, but thanks for the time taken answering. I'll read through it a couple of times to see if it contains the information I'm looking for.

[Les Watters]

If you have questions just ask. the only way you will really understand color is to read a good book on the subject.

Later
_________________
When in doubt, black it out.

Wally Wood

[watmough]

yeah,pigment=traditional media.in digital painting you can change all that with the different blending modes,so...

[bjotto]

I don't know if I've got this screwed up but I'm quite sure there's only one complementary colour for red for example. The complementary colour for red is, as i think Les Watters said, the opposite of red and if you take to opposotes and mixe them, they'll be neutrulised( -1 + 1 = 0, HCl + NaOH2 -> H2O + NaCl etc) and red + cyan = grey, when our eye looks at it anyway. and here's a little image:
feel free to prove me wrong

[jfrancis]

Look at the bottom of this page:

http://www.digitalartform.com/multiply.htm

Digitally speaking, the complement of a color is 1 minus the color

It's the photographic negative of the color

[drunken_muse]

The subject is much clearer now, thank you all for your replies!

[Adamantine]

Easy to remember:

Screen blending colours are opposite of print blending colours

RGB <> CMY

Red Green Blue <> Cyan Magenta Yellow

Then we get

Red <> Cyan
Green <> Magenta
Blue <> Yellow

That's for additive colour systems - which includes analog photography (silver print/film?).

What I don't get is how reflective works which use the additive complementary colours can look good, or do have I weird taste?

If you scan in a drawing - it will no longer have complementary colours?

If you print a digital image - it will no longer have complementary colours?

[Torstein Nordstrand]

Classic wheel of complementaries:



In my opinion, a much more useful (and accurate) arrangement (Munsell's):



Here's a good list of often used terms in colour theory, with explanations:
Introduction to working with Color
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www.torsteinnordstrand.com

[drunken_muse]

Thank you both Adamantine, Torstein - but did any of you really read the question? ;) Basically it was about there being two different kinds of them, and why this is.

Torstein > nice link though, looks interesting

[Adamantine]

Well, I'm kind of wondering about that as well - it shouldn't really work (with 2 different) since your brain percieves the colours the same in the end?

[K4NN4B15]

technically its RBY(red, blue, yellow)[color] and CMY(cyan, magenta, yellow)[light]

If you want to know the details look it up, but basically color and light arent the same thing. since you cant mix wavelengths of light on a pallet, just stick with RBY. compliments are from the RBY.