Coloring Winter

I think I should be deemed a colorist, someone who wants to change and increase the colors of reality. That has been my mission during this holiday season--to experiment with color schemes. One interesting color scheme is the tertiary color scheme. The most standard of these is red, blue, yellow.

Let's consider this picture.

Now this one could go a couple of ways. It could be a analogous complimentary color scheme of red/orange/yellow and bluish-green. Or you could make it tertiary of red, yellow, blue with the street being bluish and the green being more bluish.

Winter scenes are common with the other tertiary color scheme: orange, purple, green. That is what I decided to try. I had noticed this triad in this Monet painting in St. Louis.

First, I started with the instructions for a painting from a book, with a similar color scheme.

Then, I chose a photo from my trip to Colorado, similar to this one.

The Aspens were bright yellow. The mountains were brown/gray with snow on top. But to make my color scheme work, the mountains became purple and the Aspens went slightly more orange. Now, yellow and purple could have worked as a color scheme too, but something else would have needed to happen with the green.