Cheltenham Warchiefs

We all know about what different colours portray to us visually – Red is fire and blood, Blue is water and cold, green is grassy and natural, brown is earthy and so on. We also all should know by now how these relate to painting figures – Red for Khorne and Chaos, Green for Wood Elves, Blacks and purples for Dark Elves.

There are tonnes of theories on how colours work but the first colour circle or wheel was put together by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666. The basic concepts are as follows:

• Primary colours are Red, Yellow and Blue. These are the colours that can’t be mixed or made by combining any other colours. All other colours are made up from these 3.
  
• Secondary colours are Green, Orange and Purple.These are the colours that you get from mixing the primaries together.
  
  
• Tertiary colours are those colours formed by mixing a primary and a secondary colour together. That’s why they have two word names (yellow-green and blue-purple for example). This is where we get onto how to use the colour wheels to help you paint figures

Colour harmony is really important when choosing a colour scheme for an individual figure or an army. When you look at a figure (or anything for that matter), a harmony within the colour is pleasing to the eye. It makes you want to view the figure in greater detail and it creates a sense of order and cleanliness to the painting.

If colours do not harmonise they will either bore the person viewing or overwhelm them so your figures will either look boring and dirty or chaotic and messy. There are loads of theories again about how to use colours together and here are a few of the basic formulas.

• Analogous colours: are the 3 colours which are next to each other on the tertiary or 12 part colour wheel – for example yellow-green, yellow and yellow orange. All other colours are made up from these 3.
• Complementary colours: you choose your colour scheme from opposites on the tertiary wheel for example – purple and green as above or turquoise and orange

If, for example, you were painting wood elves you want them to be uniform and understated – gentle even. So you would use Analogous colours – a green, yellow-green, yellow and yellow-orange (you can see this colour covers the browns too).

If you wanted to paint an army that would really stand out and pop you could use complementary colours. For example, you could choose to paint an empire army in blue-purple and yellow or blue-green and red-orange.

Say you decided to use blue-green (lets call it turquoise) and red-orange (lets call it mid-orange). The more green that you add to your turquoise can be balanced out by adding more red to your mid-orange.