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Kandinsky wrote about the meanings of color in his book, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.” On its Greek roots, he wrote shades of red can both be like a flame, warm and exciting or painful. He describes keen yellow as sour, like a lemon. He took great care with white, suggesting it spoke of birth and possibilities. Then, he described black as “an eternal silence, without future and hope.”

Kandinsky used other colors. He had this curious sense of how on a “sensitive people,” the experience of one sense can leave an impression on the soul and influence the perceptions of their other senses. One example cites mentions a doctor whose patient could not eat a particular sauce without tasting the color blue.

Color also made music, which was not an uncommon observation. In his earliest works on the subject, Sir Isaac Newton attempted to classify colors by music notation. He mentions this when theorizing on texture, “Shades of colour [sic], like those of sound, are of a much finer texture and awake in the soul emotions too fine to be expressed in words.”

Much later in his career, Kandinsky experimented with adding materials to his paints to create visible textures. He mixed these understandings with his appreciation for jazz and commitment to faith to create an array of elements in his art that make his work a true snapshot of the artist’s mind.

My preferred example for Kandinsky is in his painting, Composition VIII. Kandinsky’s use of color is elegant in its simplicity. Over a muted canvas, colors and contrast drive the viewer from one event to the next. Each pop is its own story. Some colors are complimentary and others analogous. But perhaps most interesting is his matching tint when he pairs analogous colors and contrasts shade and tone when he pairs complimentary colors.

Kandinsky’s use of palette somewhat fools the observer that might be attentive to the yellow and red when really the gray and brown are the base colors. The yellow has been shaded with the brown and the red has been similarly tinted by the gray.

Similar colors can be found in Behr’s Yellow Gold, Sherwin-Williams’ Pennywise, and Benjamin-Moore’s Metropolis and Roseate.

Kandinsky’s use of paint almost guarantees colors that have never been seen in art before or since. The eclipsing sun in the upper right of his painting is not a true red, but it’s not orange. With just a slight tinge of yellow, the shape glows by itself. It’s likely a mix of the yellow used in its corona and the red from the eclipsing corona.

Similar colors can be found in Behr’s red shade, Grenadine, Pecos Spice, and yellow toned, Solar Energy.

Yellow and blue circles appear lower in the painting. Kandinsky wrote of these as eccentric and concentric movements saying where the yellow spreads out from the center, blue moves in on itself. Regardless, yellow and blue are complimentary colors on the CMYK color wheel. However, he proportionately shaded the circles and tinted the halos, which makes their relationships tetradic.

Similar colors can be found in Sherwin-Williams’ Yellow Bird, Majestic and Paddington from Benjamin-Moore, and Behr’s Bluebird.

Most colors work well with brown because any two complimentary colors will make it. For instance, red and green will make brown. Orange and blue will too. In simplified terms, brown has an element of each color. For that reason, brown is a neutral color, which is also why brown is a common color in carpets and furniture.

Similar colors can be found in Behr’s Dark As Night, Sherwin-Williams’ Sunflower, and Benjamin-Moore’s Blue.

Tones and tints of red are another example of monochromatic contrasted with tinted black and gray.

Similar colors can be found in Behr’s Spade Black and Desert Coral. Benjamin Moore’s Silver Satin. On analysis, Spade Black is a deep shade of blue and Desert Coral is a tinted yellow, making them complimentary colors.

In practice, however, we later find this not to be true. Certain color combinations only produce interesting shades of brown and making green requires more blue than yellow. But Newton’s Color Circle is what we are taught because the red, yellow, blue color wheel is just easier for kids to understand. Much less, those colors positively affect a child’s learning.

The CMYK color spectrum requires a bit more work. There are 12-colors instead of seven, with cyan, magenta, and yellow being primary. Cyan, of course, is a shade of blue, magenta a shade of red, and yellow is yellow.  Certainly someone, somewhere along the way decided red, yellow, and blue was easier on young minds, and on parents of 5-year olds whose most frequent response if to ask, “Why?”

Regardless, it is true all hues can in fact be obtained by mixing primary colors of CMYK. Depending on the application, such as kindergarten students, it’s red, yellow, and blue. But, if it’s television, stage or even ambient lighting, it’s red, green, and blue. When those three colors of light are focused on the same place, they form white light. However, print and paint do not work the same as light. For that, the primary colors are cyan, yellow, and magenta. When combined, the form black, even though most CMYK printers had a black ink reservoir.

Primary Colors

The CMYK color wheel is based on the three primary colors of cyan, magenta, and yellow; three secondary colors red, green and blue that can be made by mixing primary colors; and six tertiary colors from mixing primary and secondary colors to get orange, chartreuse, spring green, azure, violet, and rose.

Complementary Colors

Colors at opposite sides of the color wheel have the highest contrast. That is because their values are inverse and will turn gray when mixed. Changes from the red, yellow, blue color wheel show us that green and red are not really complementary while blue and yellow stay the same. In life, evidence of contrast efficacy can be seen in most police cars that use red and cyan emergency lights to make them more visible in traffic.

Monochromatic Colors

Using the values of a single color—or hue—for contrast is how we create monochrome palettes.  On a scale of lightest to darkest and express as shade, tone, and tint. Appropriately named, shade is the amount of black used to darken a color. However, tint is the level of white used to lighten a hue and Tone is the amount of gray included. Using a single hue contrasted by these values is monochrome.

Analogous Colors

Not to be confused with monochromatic, an analogous color scheme groups any three neighboring colors to form a color scheme.

Split Complementary Colors

Split complementary is one where the two analogous colors complementary to a selected color are used to form a color scheme. In this case, red has been [aired with azure and spring green.

Triadic Colors

A triadic color palette consists of any three equidistant colors on a color wheel. While this is not exclusive to CMYK, it is recommended all colors come from the same wheel.

Tetradic Colors

Pairing two sets of complimentary colors is tetradic. This more frequently appears as part of a decorated theme that includes analogous objects against an analogous background. An example of this would be a magenta armchair that doesn’t quite match the rose color of a couch in a room painted Spring Green with green trim.

Square Colors

A square color palette consists of any four equidistant colors on a color wheel. While this is similar to Tetradic, it removes the option of using analogous colors. It is a bold palette that if done well, can be amazing. It would work similar to the tetradic example, but instead, the paint colors would appear better in the darkest hues and the furniture in the lighter colors.