Picking drops from an ocean of colours
My personal take on colour theory
As designers, we’re used to working on projects where we are tasked with creating a colour scheme for a brand. To many, including myself, this appears to be a herculean task. In this article, I’m going to explain my personal perspectives and observations regarding the use of colour in art and design.
I have chosen an unconventional approach which includes certain examples and realistic scenarios to correlate and adopt colours in one design to another instead of directly explaining colour theory.
In this article, we will be covering the Complementary Colour Scheme. Complementary colours are colours that sit across each other on the colour wheel. Below is an example that shows complementary colours.
🎨 Why colour is sovereign in design
As we all know, colour is the fundamental aspect of design and it is used;
- to get more attention, attraction and focus
- to adorn & portray a brand universally
- to register effective cognitive and psychological influence on the viewer
and so on…
One of my favourite heroes from comic books is The Incredible Hulk from The Avengers. I was really interested in learning more about the thought process behind choosing the colours for this character.
Since The Hulk’s transformed body is presented as green due to gamma radiation exposure, what could be the ideal colour for his damaged pant in order to balance out the colours? Was it red? or orange? or even blue? Neither! It’s actually ‘Violet’.
Here comes a ‘Complementary Colour scheme’ for the scenario.
To be specific, in order to draw more attention to the massive body, the green colour is applied in addition with value when compared to the dark violet pants, which clearly get less attention in the frame.
Moreover, a proportional area of constituent elements of the character are focused to pay more attention is also a governing factor for balancing a colour. That is why the green massive body takes more area of the frame. You might be a little doubtful as to why I’ve dragged this character to the plot. Well…Interestingly enough, we can use The Hulk as a reference for relative study in colours applied in different designs.
I have also applied the same colour scheme for my recent artworks. If you want to see some more of my works, please visit my instagram profile below 👇
https://www.instagram.com/manuel.tom.14/
The warm orange-red skin tone is balanced by the calm blue-green background.
🔫 Hasta la vista, baby!
We can see many examples of colour theory applied in our daily lives. The movies industry is a great place to find some exemplary uses of colour theory.
When you look at the Terminator sequel you might have noticed Syborg’s saturated red eye which drew a lot more attention and focus compared to its complementary background.
You can also take a look at some works from illustrators who applied colours in a specific way which will fall under complementary colours.
👩🎨 Complementary colours in art!
Here yellowish stars become even brighter due to visual tension built by the blue background.
Many brands use balanced colour schemes to create a visual identity for themselves. For example, Firefox balances warm colours with cool colours in it’s logo. Gradually varying gradients also helping to improve visual aesthetics.
The complementary colour scheme is very helpful to get eye-catching designs or illustrations. This is because of the visual cognitive load created by the opposite colours. Each colour has a different wavelength which is received and accessed by the human brain. The disparity in hue make the tension and it becomes more attractive when it applied on artworks. The larger the difference between two colours in the colour wheel, the more cognitive load it puts on the viewer.
Colours should be applied based on the composition and area of elements in the artwork. It is not advisable to use a font with its complementary background colour especially in printed media and mobile applications. Since human eyes need to apply more concentration and effort towards a smaller area created by fonts with respect to it’s background colour which ultimately reduces legibility.
I hope you have learned something new from this article and hope to see you in the next, where I talk about Analogous colour schemes
Stay tuned! 👋
