Colour,  Lens-Artists,  Photographic techniques,  Themed galleries

Gallery: colours that complement

January 26, 2025 / 39 Comments

All colours are the friends of their neighbours and the lovers of their opposites

Marc Chagall

First, a disclaimer: in calling this gallery ‘colours that complement’ I don’t mean that they’ll be telling you how great your latest blog post was or how good you look today!

No, today we are looking at colour theory at the suggestion of Egídio, for the Lens Artists challenge. I’ve done lots of colour posts in the past but most of them focus on a single colour. Occasionally I’ve combined them, for example looking at the three primary colours: red, yellow and blue. But this focus on complementary colours is a new one for me.

I felt I knew a bit about them, but wanted to look into the subject a little more for this challenge. I found an interesting page on Canva that talked about the differences between the RGB colour wheel (used in photography, on computers, on TV etc.) and the RYB colour wheel used by artists and painters. For this post I’ll be working with the RGB wheel. In that one the primary colours are not red, yellow and blue but red, green and blue. It’s all to do with the fact that mixing coloured light is different from mixing coloured paints!

But what is a colour wheel? Canva told me that it was invented in 1666 by Isaac Newton, who mapped the colour spectrum onto a circle to demonstrate the relationship between colours. It forms the basis of colour theory, a practical combination of art and science used to determine which colours look good together.

We can use a colour wheel to choose colours that are complementary (sitting opposite each other on the wheel), analogous (sitting next to each other) or monochromatic (shades of the same colour). As photographers colour theory helps us to understand the impact different colour combinations will have.

Complementary colours

For this challenge I decided to work with the three primary colours of the RGB wheel and their complementary ones. That is:

  • Blue & yellow
  • Green & purple
  • Red & turquoise

Note that those pairings differ a little from those mentioned by Egídio, just as the Canva wheel I used differs a little from the AI-generated one he worked with. It doesn’t matter, the principle remains true. And in any case I’ve taken a few liberties with my choices; a close study of the wheel will tell you my colours aren’t always directly opposite each other! But I hope they’re close enough to prove the point about impact.

My feature photo is of street art in Valparaiso, Chile, which I think includes all the colours I’m using in my galleries.

If you want to know where these photos were taken, just click on an image for the caption. You can then scroll through a slideshow to see all the other photos in that gallery with their captions. If viewing on a phone you’ll need to click the ‘i’ in a circle (bottom right) to get that info, but you’ll only need to do so once for each gallery!

Blue and yellow
Green and purple
Red and turquoise

39 Comments

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