Colour my world 3

Have you started to look at your wardrobe with new eyes? I know when I did this myself in January I found it really challenging. We tend to have our ideas of what goes together and what doesn't. I forced myself to do a week (well 6 days) of COMPLEMENTARY colours and I found it hard, partially because I was not used to wearing those opposite combinations of colours and also because the items I had in the correct colours, the styles didn't always go well together (if I wear a looser top I like a fitted bottom & visa versa, I was forced to wear loose tops & bottoms!). I'll admit I bombed out on day 5, I don't really have any orange and it was too hot to wear the couple of things I do have with orange on them. But it challenged me to shift my paradigms and I like that!

Today I'm going to look at the last to ways of combining colours TRIADS and SPLIT COMPLEMENTS.

Let's start with TRIADS. If you look at the colour wheel above today you will see a triangle with TRIAD on it. Pretend this triangle can rotate around the colour wheel, it can stop on any 3 colours. TRIAD colours are equidistant from each other on the colour wheel. They create colourful and bold mixes. They are combinations of cool and warm colours but they stay with in their school system. They are-

RED, BLUE & YELLOW- primaries

PURPLE (VIOLET), GREEN & ORANGE- secondaries

RED PURPLE (RED VIOLET), BLUE GREEN & YELLOW ORANGE- tertiaries

BLUE PURPLE (BLUE VIOLET), YELLOW GREEN & RED ORANGE- tertiaries

SPLIT COMPLEMENT colour schemes seem complicated but they are really just a variation of the COMPLEMENTARY colours. In the split version you pair one colour with the two colours adjacent to its COMPLEMENTARY. Again if you can visualize the small isosceles triangle moving around the colour wheel, you'll know what I mean. Examples are-

RED, PURPLE (VIOLET) & YELLOW GREEN

BLUE PURPLE (BLUE VIOLET), BLUE GREEN & ORANGE

GREEN, YELLOW & RED PURPLE (RED VIOLET)

YELLOW ORANGE, RED ORANGE & BLUE

There are 12 SPLIT COMPLEMENT combinations in total. Academichic also did a colour project in recent months, click HERE to see some examples of the outfits they came up with.

There's only 2 subjects left to talk about colour-wise, MONOCHROMES and NEUTRALS so look out for them in the next few days.

xx Vanessa.