Cheatin’ with Complementary Colors: a quick and dirty color theory post
So you know what you want the big important thematic color of a design or image to be but you’re not sure what to offset it with. You art teacher in school told you about complementary colors and how they look good together for contrast but you always saw them brought up in ugly combos like this:
Gross! Why does anyone think complementary colors look good together??? They’re so clashy and blinding!
Well hang on friend. The reason you think that is because you done been bamboozled by examples that show you the most saturated, high-octane shades of each color. Of course they clash! They’re as bright and vivid as they can possibly be and they’re competing with each other for attention!
But what happens if you desaturate one half of the pairing??
Hmmm. Interesting. So the red, the blue, and the yellow have all been reduced in saturation so they’re not fighting with the green, the orange, and the purple. I did these more or less at random so they’re still not the prettiest pairings but they’re a lot easier on the eyes than the Bullshit up above.
Let’s try another configuration:
Interesting… tain’t bad, tain’t bad. Still, again I have produced these sort of at random by desaturating the green, the orange, and the purple without actively trying to make a really good pairing by adjusting both colors.
I wonder what happens if I mess with the shade and saturation of both colors in the pairing and try to make them play together?
Here I’ve left the red, the blue, and the purple as my Accent colors and made the green, the orange, and the yellow almost completely neutral to gently offset them.
I went with a purple, a red, and a blue that I liked personally in the moment. They’re not blindingly bright, but they’re much brighter than their complementary partner.
Here’s a fun thing about the colors I desaturated. Check this out.
They really are super duper neutral huh. That orange and green are almost completely gray. That yellow is verging on off-white. Although you can tell even here that they’re not totally colorless grays, they’re really approaching it. But scroll back up and compare this to how they appear above.
You can see the green much more clearly when it’s next to that bright red. It’s the exact same shade of greenish-gray, but the greenness of it is so much more apparent when it’s contrasted directly against its complementary opposite. They’re making each other pop without clashing.
Same goes for that orange – it looks pretty dull on its own in this second image, but next to the blue up there it gets kicked up just a little warmer.
The muddy yellow becomes a little clearer and more pastel next to the purple.
You can incorporate this concept into clothing designs if you have a main theme color you want to use for accents, but you’re not sure what to fill in the rest of the space with. Sometimes you can just set your background to a complementary opposite of the main color in your piece, seen below:
So when in doubt, don’t be afraid to reach for the complementary opposite of your main color to make it pop more. It’s not as ugly as those godawful All Saturation All The Time examples may have led you to believe, just tweak them around and make them play together!
When you get to know how they work together when you mix and match the saturation, it’s a very quick way to make something more visually interesting and harmonious.
