Mondrian-esque Family Tree

Another activity with which I while away my hours is genealogy. So it is that, during a moment when my mind was idling (there are of course many such moments!), I came up with the idea of a colour based family tree – that is a relationship chart where the colour of a child would be the mix of the two parents colours. I played around with this idea for a while and found a couple of snags.

The first problem was that I wanted to move away from a formal “tree” shape, but by doing so whatever I drew seemed to be a mess. In the end I decided to adopt the style championed by Piet Mondrian, using a fairly random set of orthogonal black lines to keep the colours (and hence people) neat without constraining them to a particular structure on the page.

The second snag was the seemingly inexorable rule of mixing colours that, no matter what colours go into the mix, the result sooner or later becomes a rather muddy brown! My understanding is that Piet Mondrian restricted himself to primary colours, which I clearly wasn’t going to be able to do, but I could at least maintain the fiction by keeping the colours bright. So instead of true colour mixing, I instead picked the colour from a colour wheel midway between the parents’ two colours. Thus a red grandparent and a yellow grandparent together have orange progeny (which is more or less correct for a true colour mix anyway), whilst a blue grandparent and a green grandparent have bright turquoise offspring (whereas the true mix would be a much greyer turquoise). Interestingly, since the colour wheel is a circle, there are two colours that lie between orange and turquoise, depending on which way one goes around the wheel. I have elected to use the mauve rather than the lime green.

Perhaps also worth noting that this is a very simple family tree, with only three generations, with only a few (grey) aunts, uncles and (greyish) cousins, with no remarriages, no half- nor step- brothers/sisters, no cousins marrying and no untraceable parents. In other words, not really up to the complexities of many real families. I suspect that this style of family tree won’t catch on!