Working with a Tetrad Color Wheel

Using a tetradic color scheme can be a great choice for your next quilt or art project. Tetrads contain two pairs of direct complements and therefore have a lot of contrast in them. When you're looking at your color wheel, a tetrad is shown using the large square. Some color wheels have a large rectangle, also, that's labeled as a tetrad, but most colorists don't believe that's a true tetrad because the colors aren't equidistant from each other. We have three combinations possible, and the first is yellow, with its direct complement of violet, and red-orange with its direct complement of blue-green.

And this quilt here is made with those four colors. The colors are all toned and tinted, so they're kind of dull and very, very quiet. Here we can see all four colors interacting with each other, the red-orange, the blue-green, the violet, and the yellow. The violet is very, very dirty with a very brownish hue. We hand dye it and call it churple, because it's a mixture of chocolate and purple, but this is a great combination.

And using all of the colors in the tints and the tones adds unity to it. The next combination has a very unusual combination of red with green and blue-violet with yellow-orange. And this isn't a combination you see very often, but when you do see it together, it's very powerful. This quilt began as a piece of white fabric and it was all gelatin mono-printed. I hand mixed the colors, so I know that's the colors that I started with but when they start to blend with each other, you see a lot of different things happening.

Here we see, in the center of the quilt, all four colors interacting with each other. And that's the most important thing when you're choosing colors is not the colors themselves, but how those colors are going to interact when they're placed with each other. Here, we have the red laying on top of the blue-violet, the green, and the yellow-orange. Because these are all very dulled tones and shades, the combination works really well together. Our last combination includes red-violet with its direct complement of yellow-green, and orange and blue.

And here we have it in this little quilt. Now this whole quilt has a layer of netting on top of it. And the netting is a pale gold color. That netting kind of dulls the colors underneath it, but we're seeing those colors interact with each other again, here, especially in the middle. We have the orange background that's very, very bold, but a very bold blue stripe here kind of counter plays against that bold background.

The red-violet and the yellow-green are playing a secondary role, but together they put together a really, really nice combination. So the next time you're choosing colors for a quilt or an art project think about being adventurous and going with a tetrad.