Tetradic Colour Schemes - The Square

Hey Everyone, welcome back to Colourful Friday.

This week the colour scheme gets just a tad bit tricky. The focus of this week’s colour tutorial is tetradic colour schemes.

What is a tetrad?

Tetrad means four. The tetradic colour scheme is made up of four different colours.

To make it even tricker there are two different tetradic colours schemes – one that forms a square on the colour wheel and one that forms a rectangle. I am only going to talk about the square scheme today and next week I will delve into the rectangle scheme.

The square scheme is made up of two complementary colour pairs which uses colours that are evenly spaced around the colour wheel. Between each colour are two other colours not used in the scheme. If you were to draw lines between the four colours a square would form.

Tetrad Colour Scheme on the Colour Wheel

The Tetrad Scheme on the Colour Wheel

The different colour combinations?

There are 3 different square combinations found on the colour wheel.

Green/Red & Yellow-Orange/Blue-Violet

Tetradic Colour Schemes - The Square

Blue/Orange & Yellow-Green/Red-Violet

Tetradic Colour Schemes - The Square

Blue/Yellow & Red-Orange/Blue-Green

Tetradic Colour Schemes - The Square

When creating quilts with this colour scheme one of the colours is usually the dominant colour in the quilt and all the others support it.

It is very important to pay close attention to value of colours with this scheme to create contrast and balance within the quilt.

Happy Quilting!

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