Complementing Colour Wheel Tutorial

People say that opposites attract – it may not always be true for love but it is totally true for colour! The opposites I am talking about in colour are those that sit opposite each other on the colour wheel or the complementary colours. A colour wheel is a really handy tool for helping pick colours: it’s a continuous spectrum of colours organised into a circle, flowing from the warm (red, orange and yellow) to the cool (green, blue and violet) colours. For every warm colour on the wheel, there is a complementary cool colour sitting directly opposite it and vice versa.

But what does this all mean for us cardmakers? Well, it is another tool in our craft box that can help us make stunning cards that really pop. Complementary colours harmonise with each other as well as stand out from each other so by combining them for card making you can add extra interest to any project.

You can combine them very simply by taking just one colour and use the colour wheel to find its complementary colour then use just those two colours on the project. Or you can go a little deeper and use a number of complementary pairs that work well together to give you a more complex colour combination to use on your card. If you take a look at the floral Thank You card, you will see that I’ve actually combined red-violet and red-orange in the petals and blue-green with yellow-green in the leaves, so I’ve used a couple of complementary pairs to make this card.

For the other cards I’ve kept the combinations simple and just used one complementary pair as my colour theme. I’ve then either used one colour as the main colour and used the other colour as the highlight colour or given the colours equal weight in the project. There are various ways you can use the complementary colour palette you choose, so play around with it and see what looks you can make!