While working as a make-up artist in the 1980’s, I noticed color relationships in the 100s of faces I was touching. In an era when the four “seasons” of personal color was popular for directing fashion choices, I saw something different that led me to the creation of my color system.

What I noticed instead was that people with rich reddish tones in their skin had reddish tones in the shades of their eyes and hair color, that vibrant yellow skin tones had matching golden eye and hair colors and that cool bluish-beige skin tones always had blue based eye and hair colors. From an artist’s perspective this was a wonderful revelation. Just as a painter would choose a redder Ultramarine blue paint over a more yellow cobalt blue, it made coordinating make-up a breeze with the final application looking as though it was just natural extension of the existing tones in the face.

And there was great variety in these personal colors I saw. From the palest mocha red skin to the deepest native American red, from pale yellow-ivory skin to African American toasty golden brown and from the translucent blue-beige skin to the East Indian bittersweet chocolate; all groups with the same common denominator. I deduced that these color studies of nature were not an accident; after all, the base colors of the rainbow and light itself are red, yellow and blue.

So for artistic purposes I began to arrange groups of color based on these three primary color categories. In my business of selling make-up I assembled collections of color in red, yellow and blue tones that clients were able to at long last find their perfect shade. In coordinating clothing colors the guesswork was gone from which shade of neutral was best on each person and carried into the home environment, it made sense why some settings were soothing and elegant while others felt jarring.

It wasn’t until I sold that early business and began pursuing my artwork full time that I fully understood the marvel of this natural color organization. Since paint on fabric is my medium of choice, I needed a comprehensive system to easily produce the colors that I saw in mind’s eye, colors that my eyes were trained for so long to see, colors that were not ready made and rarely even seen in commercial printed fabrics. Knowing that I needed these three groups of colors I decided to create three new color wheels to work from each one based or tinted with one of the primary colors.

So with much trial and error in balancing paint color I was able to assemble the basis for 3 new color wheels; a red-based set of primaries (true red, reddish blue and reddish yellow), a yellow-based set of primaries (primary yellow, yellowish red and yellowish blue) and a blue-based set of primaries (primary blue, bluish red and bluish yellow). Unfortunately though, just using the regulation mixing proportions with each other as in a standard color wheel did not produce the in between colors that should be there in each new wheel. Since this division of color was nature inspired I knew that there must be a pre-existing formula out there. It was then that I remembered The Golden Ratio that occurs in nature and the numerical sequence of the great mathematician Fibonacci that pointed it out. Voila! When I applied the numerical sequence to the way I blended one color into another it produced perfect gradations! Thus my complete system was born that I call "The Triadic Color Theory System”.

In my studio one wall is covered with dozens and dozens of painted fabric swatches organized by red, yellow and blue tones, each representing a different formula from my system. From these visuals I am able to pre-organize the color direction of each piece of artwork I produce. It has been said my work is distinctive because of the color used and I believe it is because of this system of arranging tones in a way that are familiar, recognizable and comfortable as we see them in nature’s order. I have only our predecessors to thank whose brilliance has unlocked these secrets for us all to use and enjoy.
If you would like to read more about The Golden Ratio or Fibonacci’s numbers start here to get an overview:

Fibonacci Facts
The Fibonacci Association