Complimentary Color Lesson for Kids

Video Transcript

"This is Tracy Cheney for Expert Village and we're looking at a color wheel and finding out some more interesting information that we can use as artists and what we're going to talk about are complimentary colors. Now they sound like they would be colors that are close to each other but actually, on the color wheel, they are the opposite color. You can always figure the color that's gonna go with the other color, they'll always work together, are the compliments. I like to call them the opposites and we also talk about them as being the pairs, and they always go together. So red and green and you know in the west we think of that, of course, as our Christmas colors. Yellow and purple and, blue and orange. And one of the things that artists have noticed is that these come together in nature and I've got some photographs here that show that. They naturally come together and you really see purple and yellow together in a sunset. I love this with the sunflower and the blue skies, we have the natural colors together, the opposite colors. And they're just everywhere when you start looking for it. Red and green, we see that a lot in the world. And I love this picture with the flowers, naturally coming with the purple and the yellow. Notice that it's always a cool color and a warm color together. They are the opposites, so you've always got a primary and a secondary and we've learned that earlier in our lessons with the color wheel. Now let's see how some artists have used this. We see the red and the green and you know what happens is it makes it pop when you put a dark and a light color together. Here's another artist using red and green, totally different way. Here's an artist using blue and orange together. And another artist using blue and orange, lots of fun ways that we can use those colors and really make our paintings exciting. Here's purple and yellow together. And I have one more example of purple and yellow. You notice all the light purple here and the warm color down at the bottom here, really makes the family stand out."