he4rty wrote:
I'm a sucker for colour and love playing with colour wheels to create palettes for designs, heres a link to one of my favourite sites
Colour scheme designer but this uses the traditional artist colour wheel of red,yellow & blue and therefore Reds complimentary colour would be Green. But you also have the light colour wheel of red,green & blue and then the Complimentary colour of red would be a light blue, I've often wondered whether the rules applied to colours wheels works with both just as effectively or if one is more favoured than the other.
Well, our eyes work on the RGB principle, because there are red, green and blue cone cells in our eyes. The whole Red, yellow, blue system is antiquated and based on a misunderstanding of how our vision works.
However, there's also a (relatively) newer colour theory, which I find quite interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_processAnyway, to answer your question, you can use either cyan or green as an opposite of red. Both work, but cyan may give an even stronger contrast due to warm-cold contrast also being in play. Orange/blue doesn't really work that well IMO (unless it's a cobalt blue or sky blue). Yellow/purple does for some reason, but then so does yellow/blue. So I guess there's no absolute rule to follow, you just have to go with your guts most of the time.