Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge ends her color theme this week. The topic is opposing (or complementary) colors. The three primary colors are: yellow, blue and red. The secondary colors are: green, purple and orange. To make green, you combine blue and yellow. To make purple, you combine blue and red. And to make orange, you combine red and yellow. So complementary colors are when you match a SECONDARY color with the PRIMARY color that is NOT part of the combination. So for example, red’s complementary color is green because green is made by combining blue and yellow (NOT red). 

Here are the combinations:
Blue & orange
Red & green
Yellow & purple

Artists have long made use of complementary colors to make their subjects “pop,” painting these colors next to each other. The contrast serves to emphasize objects in the painting. I love to use these combinations also, when I do coloring pages. Here’s an example – every shape or combination of shapes in this geometric pattern is made up of complementary colors of different hues. It is one of my earlier experiments with gel pens.

Purple and yellow shirts

Bears shirt
Ever wonder why Christmas colors are green and red? – Complementary colors!
My nephew in his new shirt – a present for Christmas