Color Triads - Orange, Green, Violet

Color Triads - Orange, Green, Violet

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Digital drawing, 800px x 600px
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The color scheme of a secondary triad is made up of the three secondary colors, orange, green and violet. This combination gives an energetic feeling to a composition, but the impact of the colors is not as intense as from a display of the primary colors.

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The Color Wheel

The Color Wheel
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Colored pencil on paper 7.5" x 7.5"
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Studying color relationships has been part of an artist's education for centuries, and the color wheel is a visual aid for exploring and organizing the use of colors.

A color wheel takes the spectrum of hues, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, in the order that they appear in when white light is split by a prism, and wraps them around into a circle. Seeing color relationships becomes easy using this chart.

Complementary color pairs (red/green, blue/orange, yellow/violet) appear on opposite sides of the color wheel. The intervals of triads of colors, such as primary colors (red, yellow, blue) or secondary colors (orange, green, violet), create triangles within the color wheel. And using a color wheel, an artist can easily identify analogous colors which sit next to each other, or warm and cool colors which fall on one side or the other of the color wheel.

Using color relationships in a painting or a drawing lets an artist select colors that will best communicate the intended meaning of the artwork, and the color wheel is an efficient visual aid for identifying those relationships.
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Color Variations 6 - Secondary Colors

Color Variations 6 - Secondary Colors

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Colored pencil on paper, 6.5" x 10"
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Orange and violet and green are known as the secondary colors, because each one is mixed from two primary colors. Orange is a mixture of the primary colors yellow and red. Depending on the proportions of pigments used, the orange will have a yellow tone or a reddish tone. Green is a mixture of yellow and blue, and violet is a mixture of red and blue.

In this drawing, I used premixed secondary colors, and I blended the edges of the primary and secondary colors together as I applied them to the paper.
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