Complementary colors

Complementary colors are two colours that, between the two of them, COMPLETE the three primaries: red, yellow and blue. The word complEmentary is often mistaken to be the word complimentary, ie, to be nice, or give a compliment. Red, yellow and blue make browns and blacks. Thus when you take two colours that are complEmentary, eg Cad Red (warm, red with a yellow undertone) and Sap Green (cool, blue with a yellow undertone) you have combined red, blue and yellow. The result will be dulled or muted. If you mix two colours that have only two pigments eg Orange ( Red with yellow undertone) and a Cad Red ( red with yellow undertone) the result will be a clear bright shade.

This occurs with secondary colours as well. Eg, Orange ( red with yellow undertone) mixed with violet ( blue with red undertone) there will be a muted result because within this pairing the three primaries are combined. The amount of the third primary in the mix will determine the muting of the resulting color. The color wheel below shows the undertone of common colors as depicted on the standard color wheel now used. It was developed from theories by Ewald Hering ( 1834 - 1918) and the Natural Color System developed by the Swedish Color Foundation from 1964 onwards.

Complementary colors are pairs of colors which, when combined or mixed, cancel each other out (lose hue) by producing a grayscale color like white or black.^{[1][better source needed]} When placed next to each other, they create the strongest contrast for those two colors. Complementary colors may also be called "opposite colors".

Which pairs of colors are considered complementary depends on the color theory one uses:

• Modern color theory uses either the RGB additive color model or the CMY subtractive color model, and in these, the complementary pairs are red–cyan, green–magenta (one of the purples), and blue–yellow.
• In the traditional RYB color model, the complementary color pairs are red–green, yellow–purple, and blue–orange.
• Opponent process theory suggests that the most contrasting color pairs are red–green and blue–yellow.
• The black-white color pair is common to all the above theories.

These contradictions stem in part from the fact that traditional color theory has been superseded by empirically-derived modern color theory, and in part from the imprecision of language. For example, blue can be the complement of both yellow and orange because a wide range of hues, from cyan to blue-violet, are called blue in English.