The Easiest Color Theory Concept to Use on Your Canvas Paintings

For some people, picking colors for canvas paintings is very intuitive. For others, it can feel like a shot in the dark. Painting may not be rocket science, but there is definitely a science to what our eyes are naturally attracted to. If you don't feel confident selecting colors for your paintings, we have good news for you! There are four types of easy-to-learn color schemes that can make this process incredibly simple. All four of them are covered in our FREE How to Choose a Background Color course, as well as our comprehensive Foundations Studies course.

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Today, we're going to cover the simplest of the four color schemes: complementary colors. The reason that this is the easiest color palette to create is that you are simply selecting opposite colors on a color wheel.

Check out the color wheel shown here. Red and green are opposite each other on the color wheel, making them complementary colors.

​This type of color scheme is sometimes called an I color scheme, because you can draw an I, a straight line, across the color wheel to find your secondary color. Across from blue, you'll find orange. Across from red-violet you'll find yellow-green, and so on and so forth.

Now that you understand the concept, how do you use it? Let's put this into practice by showing some examples in paintings! 

The first example is a waterlily painting from our Foundations Studies course.

​As you can see, the flower itself is a vibrant pink. You can think of pink as a variation of red when you're selecting colors, so the opposite of that would be green! That's why this painting works so well. The background is a complementary color for the main subject of the painting.

Next, let's look at this mushroom painting from our Mushroom Canvas Painting Kit. Again, red and green are complementary, or opposite, colors, so when this painting was designed, we knew that green would be an excellent choice to make the red mushrooms stand out!

In addition to selecting a complementary color for the background, we also created high contrast by selecting a very dark green. This makes the color of the mushrooms stand out even more. Want to learn more about how to use value, or lights and darks, to make your paintings pop? The first section of our Foundations Studies curriculum covers this!

In this painting from the Alpha Queen Canvas Painting Kit, we knew that we wanted her crown and jewelry to stand out more than her lips or dress. In order to make the gold accessories stand out, we selected a purple background, because purple is opposite yellow on the color wheel.

In order to let those two colors really shine, the lips and dress are a more neutral shade of red. That gives the two complementary colors the opportunity to be the brightest colors in the painting. If you wanted the lips to stand out more, you would want to do a bright red, and then do a more neutral shade of gold in the accessories, rather than a bright yellow.

In this case, you would more than likely also want to adjust the background color from purple to something that will make the red stand out more. If you don't want to use green as the complement to red in this case, check out How to Choose a Background Color for other color palettes that would work well!

Below you'll see two examples of butterfly paintings that we made using our Butterfly Canvas Painting Kit. In one, the artist wanted the butterfly to be yellow, so they chose to make the flowers purple to complement the yellow. In the other, the artist chose orange for the butterfly, so blue was the natural choice!

As you can see, this is a super easy method for choosing two colors that look great together. Want to get more in-depth and advanced with your color theory skills? Check out our Foundations Studies courses, which each include around 10 video art lessons and everything you'll need to do several exercises and complete paintings!

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​This FREE course includes:

• The first thing to determine before you even think about your background
• How to pick a gorgeous color palette that is backed by science
• Why choosing a background color isn't enough, and one last decision you should make.

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