Hey Everyone, welcome back to Colourful Friday.

Last week I introduced you to the Tretadic Colour Scheme in the shape of a square. This week we are going to look at the tetradic scheme in the shape of a rectangle.

The square and rectangle theme are the same in that they both use sets of complementary colour pairs to make up the four colour scheme of the tetrad. The difference is how close or far apart these two complementary colour pairs are on the colour wheel or star to form the square shape or rectangle shape.

As you may recall from last week the colours in the square shape are evenly spaced around the wheel as the sides of a square are all the same length.The colours in the rectangle are not so evenly spaced as a rectangle is made up of two long sides and two short sides.

The rectangle tetradic shape highlighted in blue on the colour wheel.

The two colours that create the long side of the rectangle are separated by three other colours on the wheel. The two colours that make up the short side of the rectangle only have one colour separating them on the wheel.

Three colours separate colours on the long side and one colour separates colours on the short side.

Rectangular Tetradic Colour Schemes

Red/Green & Yellow/Purple

Yellow-Orange/Blue-Violet & Red-Violet/Yellow-Green

Orange/Blue & Yellow/Purple

Red-Orange/Blue-Green & Yellow-Orange/Blue-Violet

Blue-Green/Red-Orange & Red-Violet/Yellow-Green

Red/Green & Orange/Blue

Once again this tetradic colour scheme can make a dramatic quilt but it is essential that one colour be the dominant one and the others support. The use of different values of each colour will help create excitement and contrast in the quilt.

The block at the top of the post uses the two complementary colour pairs of red/green and purple/yellow.  I used pink – a light value of red in the block to create some contrast along with a lighter valued yellow.

Happy Quilting!