Color Combination expamples: Tau Battle Suits

by SandWyrm

Dear SandWyrm,
I have a color question for you. I am painting a Tau XV9 battle suit in the typical Vomit Brown (in
my case VMC Medium FLeshtone) scheme. But I wanted to add a bit more color so I started
adding some Blue and Greys to sub-panels. Although I like the colors a lot, I think it is making my
model too busy. I want to bring some uniformity back to the color scheme, but stay away from the
mono-chromatic crisis suits the 'eavy Metal team uses.
Here is a link to my Picasa album for this model.
I am using mostly VMC paints but I have most of the VGC line as well. My GW paints have mostly
turned into sludge, so if you are able to offer any advice, could you suggest paints from the Vallejo
line?
Thank you,
PS: Feel free to post this question and any pictures from my album on your blog.
SandWyrm's Reply:

Your pics are all of individual parts, so I made a quick Photoshop comp of your legs and torso bits
so we have something closer to a complete suit to look at.
Here we have your original colors mapped out. You're using a near-complementary harmony of
orange-yellow and a slightly blue cyan.

If you remember from my Third Post On Color Theory, complementary harmonies are visually
striking because they use opposite hues on the color wheel. That's why they're commonly used on
super-hero costumes and such.

Problem is, it's a harmony that screams "LOOK AT ME!!!". So if you're not using it to attract
attention to something specific, it'll just create a lot of meaningless visual noise.

What you need to do then is to decide how much hue contrast you want. Maximum contrast is
achieved with opposite hues like you have here. You reduce hue contrast by traveling back around
the hue wheel until your 2 hues merge.

Let's go half-way back to orange-yellow on both sides of the wheel:

On the left we have a slightly reddish Magenta, while on the right we have a slightly Cyanish
Green. This one-quarter chunk of the hue wheel is the widest range that can really be considered an
"Analogous" harmony.

Going with a wide analogous harmony like this lets you accent things without drawing too much
attention to them.

Now let's cut the difference in half again.

Now we have a desaturated mid-tone Red on the left and a desaturated, slightly greenish Yellow on
the right. Again, we have accents and some color interest, but not very much contrast of hue.

And finally...
Here's your model with a Monochromatic scheme, where it's all Orange (just different shades).
GW's typical Tau scheme, BTW is mono-tonal, not mono-chromatic. They're using Orange +
Magenta-Red. So I think mixing up the shades in a monochromatic scheme like my orange example
above is the way to go.

I could pick out some specific paints for you to use, but I'd rather make you think. There's a nice
chart of Vallajo's colors here. :)