Complementary Colors - A Different Way

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I have talked about complementary colors a lot over the years - mostly because I think it's the one thing you can use to really make your coloring in any medium really pop. 

But you don't have to do direct complementaries - you can sort of come at them from an angle and it's still very effective. I made a card today to show you want I mean and how it works. 

I'm using a little mermaid image for this with two distinct parts - the mermaid and the shell. To keep it simple, I used four colors (except for the skin tones). The four colors are Cerise, Prawn, Nile Blue and Veronese Green. You can see that the green is used to shade the blue. So instead of choosing orange as a complementary to the blue, I chose a warm red. So the complementary relationship isn't a direct complementary - it's more subtle. The green that I used for shading is also almost a direct complementary to this same red though, so using it to shade the non-direct complementary increases the contrast overall. Same with the hot pink - that is nearly a direct complementary to the green as well - but when you look at this image overall, the overwhelming feeling you get is that it's a blue image, right? That's because the shading color is adjacent to blue on the color wheel.

So all that to say you don't have to always go straight across the color wheel to get a pop of contrast - you can wiggle around a bit! I used the matching dies to cut her out and put her on my fave 300 gsm kraft cardstock. 

I'm part of a blog hop today with this sweet little mermaid. To see more inspiration - check out the list below!

Start here

Lauren

Rick

Tracy

Jenn

Jessica

Deana

I'll be back today at noon - don't forget! Loveyameanitbye.

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