The Color Wheel

The Color Wheel
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Colored pencil on paper 7.5" x 7.5"
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Studying color relationships has been part of an artist's education for centuries, and the color wheel is a visual aid for exploring and organizing the use of colors.

A color wheel takes the spectrum of hues, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, in the order that they appear in when white light is split by a prism, and wraps them around into a circle. Seeing color relationships becomes easy using this chart.

Complementary color pairs (red/green, blue/orange, yellow/violet) appear on opposite sides of the color wheel. The intervals of triads of colors, such as primary colors (red, yellow, blue) or secondary colors (orange, green, violet), create triangles within the color wheel. And using a color wheel, an artist can easily identify analogous colors which sit next to each other, or warm and cool colors which fall on one side or the other of the color wheel.

Using color relationships in a painting or a drawing lets an artist select colors that will best communicate the intended meaning of the artwork, and the color wheel is an efficient visual aid for identifying those relationships.
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Art Every Day Month - November 21

Mixing Relationships between Colors





We're all familiar with the standard circular color wheel, showing the primary colors of red, yellow and blue, and their relationships to a number of other colors. Color wheels have been tools of scientific examination since the days of Sir Issac Newton who used prisms to split white light from the sun into a continuous spectrum of colors.

What I did for today's Art Every Day for the Month challenge is more of a color mixing chart than a color wheel. I arranged four base colors, alizarin crimson, lemon yellow, viridian, and prussian blue, into the four corners of the rectangle. The two blocks in between each pair of base colors show the colors mixed from those pairs, across the top, bottom, sides and diagonally through the center of the rectangle.

If I had paid a bit more attention while I was working, I might have mixed up enough fluid colors to paint flat washes on each of the 16 blocks. I might also have been a bit more precise about the proportions of base colors I used, and even paid some attention to the tinting strength of the base colors, too. Lessons learned for next time.

But even this simple mixing chart demonstrates the intermediary relationships between these four base colors, and that's what I was hoping it would do.