Color Theory: The Color Wheel

A huge component of color theory is understanding the properties of the colors themselves as well as the relationships between colors, and whet better tool to put to use than a color wheel. Colors, generally, can be described by three qualities: hue, value, and intensity. A hue is the color itself (i.e.: red, purple); value is how light or dark it is (in terms of greyscale); and intensity is how saturated the color is (think of bright versus dull).

A tool I highly recommend every artist invest in, especially if you're just starting out, is the "Pocket Color Wheel" from The Color Wheel Company. Here we will look at it in more detail.

On one side we see our standard color wheel as well as a spinning windowed sheet attached to it, that lets us see each hue mixed with our primary colors as well as their tint (hue + white) and shade (hue + black). We will go over mixing colors more in our next post, so stay tuned!

And above we have our own rendition, with somewhat less flexibility, (I used one of my split primary pallets to create this particular one; if you're curious about what split primaries are, I highly encourage you read our blog post on that as well!)

On the back of the same tool we can take a close look at each color's tint, tone (hue + grey), and shade. As well as examples of harmonious color schemes as we spin the wheel in the middle and have the arrows pointing accordingly. Let's go over some of these!

• Monochromatic: tint, tone, shade of only one color.

• Analogous: colors next to each other on a color wheel, this can be anywhere 2-5 colors.

• Complementary: we have an entire post about this, but I wanted to address this here as well, complementary colors, are just colors straight across from each other on the wheel.

• Split-complimentary: compared to complimentary, instead of going straight across, we use the two colors hugging the complement.

• Triad: using three colors equidistant from each other on the wheel.

• Tetrad: using four colors as a set of two complements.

• Key color: predominant color in a work of art.

And here's our version of it, created with our well known 6-chroma scheme.

Happy coloring,

Viktoria