CHAPTER 7: THE RELATIONSHIP OF The Scooter
™
COLORS TO EACH OTHER
The diagram below will help to illustrate this:
This diagram represents the blending of a mixture that is composed of ten parts of dye to a certain volume of
water. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that “Primary 1” is Yellow and “Primary 2” is Red. 10 Yellow would be
pure Yellow, and 10 Red would be pure red. 9-1 would represent 9 parts of “Primary 1” or Yellow, in this case,
and 1 part of “Primary 2” Red. 9-1 would represent 9 parts of would represent the reverse: 1 part Yellow and 9
parts Red. 5-5 is equal parts of each, and in this case would be a color everyone would recognize as “Orange”.
To a point, in either direction, the Orange will “lighten” or “darken”. But past that point, the Yellow or Red will
become so apparent that it will “dominate” the other.
So how do you darken a secondary color? Think about it. Let’s use Orange as the example some more. What
would happen if you add a small amount of Blue? The Blue would make the Orange “be” less Red if it was a Red-
Orange. It would also make the Orange be less Yellow, if it was a Yellow-Orange.
This illustrates a principle in color blending which is often called “flattening or dulling”. “Flattening” is the
process of adding the third primary color to a secondary color in order to adjust the secondary color. This
adjustment can be in order to darken the secondary color, or to make the dominant primary color less
noticeable (sometimes this process of making a particular primary color less apparent is called, “numbing it
out”).
At this point in our explanation, it will be useful to become familiar with a tool called a “color wheel”. A
color wheel is basically a diagram that illustrates the relationship of the primary colors and secondary colors
to each other.
10 9-1 8-2 7-3 6-4 5-5 4-6 3-7 2-8 1-9 10
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