Coloured Cabins - TERTIARY COLOURS

Welcome to the continuation of my COLOURED CABINS summer posts. We've looked at the 3 PRIMARY COLOURS and the SECONDARY COLOURS and now we're going to take a brief look at TERTIARY COLOURS on the COLOUR WHEEL

Our 3 PRIMARY COLOURS are RED, YELLOW and BLUE

Our SECONDARY COLOURS are made from a mix of 2 PRIMARY COLOURS. The ORANGE, GREEN and PURPLE are our SECONDARY COLOURS. RED combined with YELLOW creates ORANGE. YELLOW combined with BLUE creates GREEN and BLUE combined with RED create PURPLE (or VIOLET).

Now, what happens when we mix a PRIMARY with a SECONDARY colour? A RED with the ORANGE, or a BLUE and GREEN. We get a combination of these 2 colours, but one will appear stronger. So our RED and ORANGE mix results in an ORANGE with a bit more RED in it. We call this a RED-ORANGE.

We've got a YELLOW-ORANGE that is an ORANGE with a lot of YELLOW it.

We've got a YELLOW-GREEN that results in a nice bright lime green colour!

We've got a BLUE-GREEN which we are more familiar calling a Teal or Turquoise.

We've got a BLUE-RED which is a nice grape colour AND

We've got a Red-Purple which is more of a raspeberry or burgundy.

Have you noticed that we usually say the PRIMARY COLOUR first then the SECONDARY COLOUR? This indicates which colour is the strongest.

These are the 12 colours in what we commonly call the COLOUR WHEEL. I encourage you to print off the COLOUR WHEEL chart in the previous post and play with some fabrics from your stash. Don't worry too much about the colours being too perfectly matched. Use what you have to help you see how the colours relate to each other.

I think when we understand how these PRIMARY COLOURS are combined, we have a greater understanding of why certain colours look good together and greater confidence on choosing fabrics for our next quilting project.

In my next post I'll show you how to combine colours from across the wheel for COMPLIMENTARY COLOURS.