Complementary Contrast and Simultaneous Contrast

Complementary

Contrast:

Colors that are located opposite one another on the color wheel.

Placing two complements next to each other excite those two colors to maximum vividness.

Placing two complements next to each other excite those two colors to maximum vividness.

(There’s also split complements.)

Mixing two complements together cancels out each of the two colors’ intensity:

(Chart by Johannes Itten)

(A chart I made with watercolor)

Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch, 1880’s

Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch, 1880’s

Tomma Abst

2004

(A split complimentary relationship.)

Split complementary contrast:

Ken PriceContemporary American Ceramic sculptor

Ken Price

Ken Price

Complementary Optical Mixing!

Remember this chart? How your perception of a particular value changes depending on the values surrounding it?

Well: this works with color too!

Simultaneous Contrast in action!

(This diagram is from Josef Albers’ book The Interaction of Color.)

Josef Albers

The effect of black and white on a color:

Project Number Six: Complementary and Simultaneous Contrast You are going to make a painting in acrylic that takes advantage of the unique characteristics of both Complementary Contrast and Simultaneous Contrast. First, use your pencil and ruler to make a 3” border along the long side of you 15”x20” illustration board, and a 4” border along the short side—making your inside composition 9”x12”. Then divide that composition in half along the long side, making two side-by-side compositions that are 6”x9” each. Within both of these compositions, you are going to create a long, thin, flat shape that metaphorically represents an important journey you have taken in the course of your life. This shape must traverse both halves of your total 9”x12” composition; it can be naturalistic or abstract, but it needs to be flat.  For each half of the two rectangular negative spaces behind your shape, you are then going to paint in two chosen complementary pairs from Itten’s color wheel. Your long, thin interior shape will be painted with an approximately equal admixture of these two complementary pairs, plus a little white mixed in. Notice that when you mix your two complementaries together to create the color for the interior shape, these colors will cancel out each other’s intensity and create a neutral color. Notice also how your perception of this neutral color will dramatically change depending on which complementary background color surrounds it. The effect of simultaneous contrast here will make this neutral color ambiguous—it will lose its identity. Hint: be sure to mix a pretty large quantity of paint for all three of your shapes—you don’t want to have to redo an entire shape if you run out of color before its completely painted in.

And now for the demo…