Selecting a Tetradic Color Scheme for a Project

We have been taking a look at the color wheel and discussing some of the ways that color combinations can be made. One of the reasons I wanted to take you on this little artful learning adventure is to challenge you to stretch the way you look at the color combinations you use in your projects. Even if you know that you love a certain group of colors and they are your go-to colors, using a different method of coming up with a color palette, can introduce you to something new you may like.  I’m not talking about just going completely opposite of what you like, I’m just saying that you may be pleased with using a couple of your favorite colors and just using a different method of color selection.

One of my favorite scrapbook pages I made last month is the one shown in this post.  When I began to examine what type of color scheme this might be, I was surprised that it actually used a tetrad of colors – four colors.  Another name for this is a double complementary color scheme, since it is two sets of complementary colors. The four colors in this method form a rectangle and on a more simplified color wheel you see that the short sides of the rectangle have one block of color between the points of color.  Here is a look at this on the color wheel.  For some reason, when I upload this to my website, it just doesn’t look the same, so you’ll just have to look at it and get the general idea that the four colors are yellow, green, blue, and the purply-pink color.

Here is a closer look at the page. Everybody should have someone this happy in their life!  Even though this is a digital page, you can see how it would be so easy to create a similar page by stamping the background images, and then stamping the floral images.

If you’d like information on other color scheme selection methods you might like to see the previous posts on using a  complementary, triadic, monochromatic, or analogous color palette. Do you have a favorite method yet?