The Seven Color Contrasts #colors #art #painting #arteducation #design

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Seven different color contrasts.

[00:00:01]Starting with contrast of hues. This is red, yellow, and blue. These are the primaries. They're always different from each other as are all colors in terms of hue.

[00:00:09]Next, there's contrast of temperature.

[00:00:11]So, we've got a red orange neutral on the left, a blue on the right, a violet at the bottom that's more neutralized.

[00:00:17]So, red orange is kind of a warm color, blue is a cool color, but these are all relative to each other. So, that violet, which is normally thought of as a cool color, is warmer than the blue above it.

[00:00:29]Then, there's simultaneous contrast. So, this gray, it's the same across the board, but the gray on the left looks a little bit more green because it's surrounded by red, and the gray on the right looks a little more warm and maybe even red orange uh tinted because it's surrounded by that green and that blue green around it.

[00:00:44]Then, there's complementary contrast with complementary colors. These are colors on opposite ends of the color wheel.

[00:00:49]And so, these are just going to contrast with each other in strong strong ways in multiple ways, and we can play with this as artists.

[00:00:57]Value contrast is where you have a contrast between darks and lights. So, you have all these midtones between.

[00:01:02]This is a monochromatic scale here showing you how you can have different contrast based on how light something is against something that's dark or how dark something is against something that's light.

[00:01:13]Contrast of saturation has to do with a color being desaturated. And so, you get the same color just headed towards gray or neutral.

[00:01:22]Contrast of proportion has to do with how much of a color there is against another color. So, here we've got this overwhelming amount of this blue violet against these reds. And so, that there's just a contrast there between how much of one color we're seeing against a different color.

[00:01:37]Now, you've got the lowdown and you can talk about