Your Basic Color Wheel
This is the back of an every day color wheel. On this particular color wheel there are actually three wheels put together so they'll spin. One wheel (the one in the middle) contains all the color choices for each section of the wheel. In this particular view you can see the tint, tone and shade of each color. On the opposite side, however, the outer wheel will show you what you'll get if you mix the three primary colors, white, or black with each of the color choices. So if you put the red selector over blue the little window will show you violet.
Since I already mentioned tint, tone and shade, let's talk about those for a minute.
- Tint is when you add white to a color.
- Tone is when you add gray in order to "tone it down".
- Shade is when you add black.
Ok that's the way the color wheel tells you to create tins, tones and shades, but it's not how most artists do it. In fact, classical color theory tells us not to use black at all. What most people percieve as black is usually a dark brown, like burnt umber, mixed with a dark blue, like french ultramarine blue. How do you get a tone or a shade, you may ask? That's where understanding color relationships becomes important.
Defining The Colors
Generally, every child is taught the three primary colors in grade school. They're blue, yellow and red.
From these colors you should be able to mix every color imaginable in the spectrum. There is a really easy way to remember the basic spectrum: ROY G BIV. Say it like a name and you'll never forget it. The letters are in order for the color progression they represent.
- Red
- Orange
- Yellow
- Green
- Blue
- Indigo
- Violet
After the primary colors come the secondary colors, which are made by mixing equal parts of two primary colors. These colors are orange, violet and green.
And finally we have the tertiary colors. These colors take the secondary colors a step further by adding a bit more of the primary colors. By doing so you end up with yellow-orange and red-orange, red-violet and blue-violet, and blue-green and yellow-green.
Next let's examine how these color families interact with each other, and how we can use them in a more methodical way.
Color Harmonies (Relationships)
There are a number of color harmonies, also called relationships, but I am only going to cover the ones that are usually listed on the color wheel above.
- Monochromatic
- Analogous
- Achromatic
- Complementary
- Split Compliments
- Diad
- Triad
- Tetrad
We'll start with monochromatic and work our way down. Mono- means one and -chroma means color. This is a color scheme that uses only one color and its tints and tones.
An analogous color scheme is when you use three colors that lie next to each other on the color wheel. In doing so, you may use any tint, tone or shade of those colors.
Achromatic simply means "the absence of color", so an achromatic color scheme is created by using various blacks, whites and grays.
Complementary colors are those colors that lie directly across from each other. For example, red and green, blue and orange, and yellow and violet are three sets of complementary colors. If you notice, blue is a primary color and orange is a secondary color, which is made up of the remaining two primary colors, and therefore complements (or "completes") blue. The same goes for the remaining. Also, it is important to point out that one color is going to be warm and the other will be cool, but we'll discuss that later.
Split-complements are when you choose one color and the two colors adjacent to its complement. In this example green is our main color and our split-complements are red-violet and red-orange. Green is a cool color, red-violet is warmer than green but cooler than yellow-orange, and yellow-orange is the warmest of the three.
On the color wheel you will notice "diad" spelled with an "i", however, every other field of study spells it with a "y", so it would by a "dyadic" color scheme. In Sociology dyad refers to a relationship between two, and in color theory it's no different. A dyadic color scheme is when you use two colors that are two spaces apart on the color wheel.
Next is the triad. We have all at least seen a tricycle before, so we know that tri- means three (as in three wheels). A triadic color scheme is using three colors that are equally placed on the color wheel, which creates a triangle. This is different than a split-complement because a split-complement isn't evenly spaced.
Finally we see the tetrad, which of course means four. Notice how it goes up from one to four? Probably a good way to remember it! There are two types of tetrads--the rectangular tetrad and the square tetrad. On the color wheel shown at the top of this page it will tell you that a tetrad is a "contrast of four or more colors on the wheel". That's wrong. Any color theorist or art teacher will tell you that it's only four colors. Other fields of study, like genetics, even say a tetrad is a "group of four".
Well, that's it for the basic explanation of a color wheel.
COMING UP NEXT
A look at using complementary colors to create shading, tips to mixing flesh tones, and also some tips for your palette and swatches. Read Part 2.
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