Triadic color scheme

Triadic color schemes are based on three colors spaces more or less evenly around the color wheel. The colors you choose could be high-croma colors like cadmium yellow, cadmium red medium and cobalt blue or it might be colors that are more muted like burnt sienna, yellow ochre and ultramarine blue. You might think that for a painting to fall in this category the colors you would select would have to be primary colors, but that's not so, they could be three secondary colors.

In using a color scheme like this, be careful not to use equal amounts of the colors because you will lose your dominant color factor.

In looking for a painting that would fit this category I ran across a delightful painting by Callaway Painter member BJ Wright. While I haven't seen this painting in person, it looks like she has used a triactic secondary color scheme to set this painting up by using orange and green and violet as her color notes. She uses the dark violets under the trees to confirm depth and the cool of the forest, and the dominate green we all have in the south during summer, then she uses red-orange in the foreground to draw attention to the Queen's Anne's lace that was her inspiration for this painting.


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10" x 8" oil on canvas covered hardboard - painted en plein air, alla prima "Queen Anne's Lacy Meadow" B.J. Wright See more of B.J.'s work by visiting
http://beejw.blogspot.com/
Paying close attention to the colors we use will help us all learn more and more about what makes some of our paintings successful and some not. I painted at the Callaway butterfly center Saturday morning for about 2.5 hours until the air started to heat up and never could get the roof angle right, so I’ll try again, or maybe I'll take the advice that has been given to me many times and just simplfy what I'm painting and not try to paint EVERYTHING. :) With a few minor value changes back in the studio, I might be able to save the right side of this painting. Thank goodness for saws. :) Or, I might take this back to the butterfly center and work on this a bit more. Whatever I decide to do, the value of painting outside with lessons learn can not be replaced.