Today, specifically, color combinations. To start off with, we'll talk about the analagous scheme. And so what that is, is it's any colors

on the color wheel that are next to each other. So what I've chosen are the colors from blue

to yellow, and everything in between there. So, you can see in this one, we've got a blue

sky, blue mountains, green trees, and most of the yellow is in the ground. And then another

thing you might notice is there's quite a bit of red and browns in there as well. The

truth - you're never really going to get too pure of a color scheme, and if you do, chances

are it could be very boring. So don't limit yourself just too much, but think of the color

scheme as a way to promote harmony in your painting. So, for instance, the analgous color

scheme works very well when you're trying to create one solidified mood. It could be

a calming mood using blues, yellows, and greens. It could be an intense mood such as with a

fiery sunset. It coudl be something even a little more melancholy if you went jsut towards

the blues and a couple purples. Let's move on here. We're going to go back to our color

wheel and explode out the next scheme. The complimentary scheme starts off with two colors,

opposite each other on the color wheel. I've chosen green and red. I want to extend this

a little bit, so I'm also going to use the colors right next to my complimentary colors.

basically, what I get is a split complimentary scheme. Th advantage of this is it doesn't

limit me to just two colors it allows me a full range. What you see when you look at

this painting is primarily muted green, browns, and reds. In the background is some purple

and that's where it's important to have additional colors added. But what you don't see is a

strong puyrple. We've taken that color out and we're focusing on red versus green, and

there's also yellow in there. Without all those colors, it woldn't be as strong as it

is. If these colors go back down to the color wheel, once again we can pick a different

scheme. This time what I want to look at is the monochromatic scheme. So if I pull up

my blue, I can get anything from a dark value to a light value. A foggy seascape or a night

scene might be very well suited for a monochromatic scheme. In this painting, you can see lots

of purples, blues. blacks, some turqoise, and even up in the sky, some grays which compared

to the blues looks warm. Which brings up a very important point When you're painting

with a color scheme, you want to think in terms of warm and cool colors. Any time you

can layer warm and cool colors, you create a more vibrant scene. In the sky, we have

cool grays against warm greys. in the background rocks we have warm grays against the cool

gray foreground. What you get with the monochromatic scheme is something with highly intense detail

that is focused on shapoes, primarily. because you are talking about value contrast. You're

no longer talking about colors, you're talking about how do the shapes become rendered, and

how do we identify what is that shape. The last one I want to talk about is the prismatic

scheme, which includes all colors. You'll see that usually, you're loooking for a prismatic

scene that is biased towards another scheme. You don't ever want to limit yourself too

much. Happy Painting!