Painting for Beginners: Six Basic Color Schemes In Art For Harmonious Paintings

(Get free painting tips and plein air painting techniques sent straight to your inbox or on my social media.)

How many color schemes are there?

Altogether there are eighteen color schemes, or harmonies, in art. As a beginner you don’t need to know them all. Some useful ones that are easy to understand and use for beginners are: Balanced, Analogous, Basic Complementary, and Split-Complementary.

What are the three basic Balanced color schemes in art?

There are three Balanced color schemes in art: primary, secondary and tertiary. As you can see in the color diagrams below, the hues are spread evenly around a wheel. Artists use color wheels as a way to arrange colors according to their relationships. When you set up your painting palette, having them arranged around the wheel makes it easier to find and mix your colors.

Primary colors

The most basic color scheme in art has just three colors, or hues: red (R), blue (B) and yellow (Y).

These are called the three primary hues because they are pure, they cannot be created by mixing other colors. Together they are called a primary color harmony.

Old Master primary color harmony paintings

You tend not to see primary color schemes in Old Master paintings, but they were widely used during the abstract art movement. Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko both used primary colors in a lot of their paintings.

Secondary colors

Secondary colors are created by mixing the primary colors in equal parts. There are three secondary colors. Orange (YR), Green (G), and Purple (P).

Orange is created by mixing red and yellow colors. Green is made by mixing yellow and blue colors. The third and last secondary color is purple which is created by mixing red and blue.

These colors are known as a secondary color harmony.

Old Master secondary color harmony paintings

Tertiary Colors

Tertiary colors are the third level of hue. They are made by mixing equal parts of one primary and one secondary hue, and are named after the parent hues. For example: yellow plus green makes yellow-green (YG), red plus purple makes red-purple (RP) and so on.

The tertiary color harmony has 12 tertiary colors. The three primary and three secondary colors, plus blue-green, blue-purple, red-orange, red-purple, yellow-green, and yellow-orange.

Old Master tertiary color harmony paintings

Advanced color schemes in art

We have already seen the three Balanced color schemes (primary, secondary, and tertiary). Here are three more important color schemes in art for beginners.

Complementary color harmonies

Complementary color harmonies and hybrids of these harmonies are probably the most important harmonies of all. This is because a fundamental aspect of painting involves the contrast of opposites: warm against cool, light against dark, loose against tight, large against small, and so on. When you place complementary colors next to each other, you create a very strong contrast where the colors appear more vivid and brighter.

The above diagram illustrates the Basic Complementary harmony, which consists of two hues opposite each other on the color wheel.

Split complementary color harmonies

This is a split complementary harmony, where one of the two complementary hues is replaced by the two hues immediately either side of it on the color wheel. For example, the split of the yellow-violet complementary harmony is the yellow-red violet-blue violet split complementary. Conversely you can keep the violet and use the violet-yellow orange-yellow green split complementary harmony.

The use of complementaries adds excitement to a painting and is a means by which you can emphasize certain parts of the painting in order to communicate the main idea or concept of your painting.

Analogous color harmonies

Analogous harmonies use colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel, such as red, red-orange, and red-violet. These harmonies are simple to apply since all the hues are closely related.

Some more examples are:

• yellow, yellow-green, and green
• violet, red-violet, and red
• red, red-orange, and orange
• blue, blue-violet, and violet.

Analogous harmonies often convey a feeling of quiet and rest.

More about color harmonies

Color harmony derives partly from the relationship of hues to each other in a painting.

Color harmonies are commonly described using a color wheel. These wheels show the relationship of the hues. There are four major types of color harmonies you need to know about.

How to use these charts

Do not use these charts while painting unless you are using them purely as a learning exercise – it will kill your spontaneity. The best way to use these charts is when you are sitting in a comfortable chair looking at your paintings and wondering why the painting is not working. Get the charts out and see if you can match your painting fairly closely to one of the charts, with only one color missing. If you can do that, you may have found the missing color that could solve your painting problem.

Balanced harmonies use colors evenly spaced around the color wheel. The number of colors is usually three (a triad) or four (a tetrad).

To learn more

To learn more about the different color harmonies and how to use them, see

• the lessons on Color in the Virtual Art Academy® Apprentice Program.
• Wikipedia Color Schemes

Thank You

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope you find it useful. If you would like to get free painting tips by email, please sign up for my free tips newsletter.

If you are interested in a structured approach for learning how to paint, take a look at my online painting classes.

Happy painting!

Barry John Raybould
Virtual Art Academy

What The Students Are Saying