While watching an advertisement on television, I was rather dazzled by the colors—especially the combination of bright yellow and blue clothing worn by the actors. “I see what you did to me there,” I said to the television. “You are throwing complementary colors at me.”
Smart stuff, that.
Way back in the day, I attended a
series of art classes at Montana State University. A lot of interesting things
came from those classes. I met some lovely people, sketched live (fully
unclothed) models, and studied color theory, including the use of complementary
colors.
The first thing to recognize is that
complementary colors are not necessarily being nice to each other. English
being what it is, we are dealing with homophones here. First, we have
“compliment” (with an i): a polite expression of praise or admiration.
Our “complement” (with an e) refers to something that completes or
enhances something else. In our particular case, we are talking about colors
from the exact opposite sides of the color wheel. These are pairs of colors
which, when combined or mixed, cancel each other out by producing a grayscale
color like white or black. When placed next to each other, they offer the
strongest contrast between the two colors.
Blue and yellow particularly grab my
attention. My attraction to colors like these is one of the reasons I am
generally not allowed to pick out my own clothing for important occasions. I’ve
posted some complementary color examples below.
—Mitchell Hegman
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