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A practical lesson in choosing colors for your beadwork - part two


See last week's post for part one of this tutorial!


The analogous color scheme starts with the dominant color that you’ve already identified, and adds colors that are adjacent on the color wheel. In this case, I have chosen to go from blue through teals, true green, to yellowish green. We could have gone from blue through the purples instead, but I made the first choice since the focal piece does have green in it, and has no purple. There are plenty of colors to choose from in this piece: I don’t think it’s necessary to add too many more!

Remember, if you choose this scheme, you should consider all the tints, tones, and shades of the colors as well as the pure hues.



Once you have your analogous color scheme set up, it’s a very easy matter to add one of the complementary colors, most often the complement to the dominant color. In this case, I have added the pale orange that we saw before. An analogous-complementary color scheme has just a bit more pop and sizzle than a plain analogous scheme. That may not always be what you want though, so I feel it’s still worthwhile to consider both.

Interestingly, in this case, we could achieve the look of an analogous-complementary scheme by adding a liberal amount of golden or copper metal throughout the piece! Well, isn’t that convenient?


The last color scheme that I want to examine is the triadic. It consists of three colors, spaced somewhat equally around the color wheel. Here we’ll start with blue, and add red and yellow, which are all spaced an equal distance from each other. Most likely we would not use all three pure hues, but maybe use pale pinks and yellows with the stronger blue.

I feel we are starting to splash too many unrelated colors around here. If the focal piece had any pink in it, it might be really nice, especially with the pale yellow echoing the gold dichroic glass. But there is no pink, and the scheme totally ignores the green which is also so prominent along with the blue of the focal piece. I also didn’t care for a triad based upon green (adding purple and orange), and didn’t even bother to photograph it.

Since this fused glass piece uses both blue and green glass, and they are both so strong, I am leaning towards using either an analogous or analogous-complementary scheme. A monochromatic blue scheme would be fine too, but it feels too “safe” to me compared to how lively the focal piece is. Again, if you disagree with my choices, that is perfectly fine. The bead police will not show up at your door and confiscate your stash!


So, join me next week when I share the tutorial for stringing this one up!

Copyright 2017 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact.

Comments

Mia said…
Thank you for sharing.