—and we shall have 54 colours and hues of colour. Of each of these 54 colours and hues imagine 10 degrees of depth, and we get 540 colours, hues, tints, and shades, all differing from one another to an obvious degree.
Mark this fact, that any colour, tint, hue, or shade of such a diagram has its complement in one other of the colours, tints, hues, or shades of the diagram, and that only two of this series of 540 are complementary to each other; thus, if you fix on any one colour of the 540, there is but one colour in the whole that is complementary to it, and it is complementary to but this one other colour.
The student will do well to try and make a colour-diagram of this kind, of a simple character, say such as the following, only using pigments for my numbers; but in doing so he must exercise the utmost care, in order that he secure some degree of accuracy of tint or shade, and if he can call to his aid an experienced colourist it will be of great assistance to him.
This table is highly valuable, as it gives ninety harmonies, if carefully prepared in colour; and the preparation of such a table is the very best practice that a student can possibly have.
Let us for a moment consider this table, and suppose that we want to find the complement to some particular colour, as the third shade of red. We find the complement of this in the third shade of green opposite. If we want the complement of the second shade of orange-yellow, we find it in the second shade of blue-purple opposite, and so on. Thus we have a means of at once judging of the harmony of colours.
It must ever be borne in mind that pigments mixed in the proportions given will not yield results such as would occur when the coloured rays of light are combined; thus three parts, either by weight or measure, of chrome yellow when combined with eight parts of ultramarine would not form a colour representing the secondary green, nor would the result be more satisfactory were other pigments combined in the proportions given. What we have said in respect to the proportions in which colours combine to form new colours applies only to the coloured rays of light.
It must now be noticed that while colours harmonise in the proportions stated, the areas occupied by the different colours may vary if there be a corresponding alteration in intensity. Thus eight of blue and eight of orange form a perfect harmony when both colours are of prismatic intensity; but we shall still have a perfect harmony if the orange is diluted to one-half its strength with white, and thus formed into a tint, provided there be sixteen parts of this orange of half strength to the eight parts of blue of full strength.
The orange might be further diluted to one-third of its full power, but then twenty-four parts would be necessary to a perfect harmony with eight parts of prismatic blue; or to one-fourth of its strength, when thirty-two parts would be necessary to the harmony.