I have been underestimating analogous color schemes my whole life

I learned to appreciate analogous color schemes well into being an artist and taking multiple art classes. I want to share my thoughts so others who think like me can learn from my experience.

I had it hammered into my head that "complementary color schemes are the most interesting", and so I thought "if complementary color schemes are the most interesting, analogous must be the most boring", so I basically ignored them forever.

But the thing is I always struggled with making complementary color schemes work, I never liked the result. It looked "nice", but it was a bit boring, and too "obvious" if that makes sense. And some combinations like red and green basically looked off no matter what. And forget about yellow and purple.

When I started experimenting with colors more, I realized that I always preferred the analogous color scheme versions. The colors were cohesive, and looked good. For example, instead of trying to make red+green work, I achieved much better results by using olive+orange. One of the paintings I sold used this color scheme and people passing by at a show were so drawn to it in a way that even they couldn't explain.

The trick to making analogous color schemes work is making one of the colors dark and desaturated, or just playing around with the values and saturation to create contrast, so the colors feel "different" enough, even though they are neighbors. You know the trick of putting a transparent color overlay on top of an image to make all the colors more cohesive? that is basically nudging all the colors towards a single color, making it feel more analogous.

I hope that's helpful to someone! The only complementary color scheme I still love is blue+orange, but otherwise I'm an analogous convert.