Color Harmony in Paintings

I like taking complimentary colors and building an image around a color scheme.

When painting "In With the Tide" I planned the color around a specific set of warm and cool colors. The warms consisted of yellow ochres and orange shades complimented by blues and violets.

It helps simplify the mixing if you keep the piles of colors in areas relative to the arrangement on your palette. I arrange my colors from warm to cool, starting with the warms on my right.

My lighter values and warms tend to be on the right of my mixing area nearest my white paint, middle values in the middle of the mixing area and cools and darks to the left.

I also added a touch of warm green in the water and echoed the same color in the distant shrubs. The strong diagonal and change in scale of forms create the spatial depth while the color notes of the foreground and distance hit some of the same notes.