Week 5: Feb 4 - 8

The Color Wheel


The most important aspect of painting is your knowledge of the color spectrum and how the colors fit together. No matter what medium you paint in or what style of painting you prefer, if you don't know your color wheel you may as well give it up for a bad job. The funny thing is that many people seem to battle with the color wheel, yet it is very basic when you have learnt it the correct way.

Let's look at where the colors we see come from first.

Rays coming from the sun, or a light bulb are invisible and are called 'white' light. This white light consists of all the colors of the rainbow. We see the object that the light is shining on because the object is reflecting some of that white light back to your eyes. What part of the white light that is reflected is determined by the color of the object e.g. a green ball will only reflect the green frequency (component) of the white light. White light consists of seven distinct colors, namely red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Of these seven colors, three of them can be used to mix the rest. They are red, yellow and blue. How do we know this?

Let's look at where the colors we see come from first.

Primary Colors

Isaac Newton found that white light going through a prism is broken up into these seven colors. Further experimentation showed that by combining red, yellow and/or blue together in different amounts any color could be obtained. These colors (red, yellow and blue) are called primary colors and are shown below:

This forms the basis of our color wheel. You will notice that the three colors form a triangle. Memories this triangle and you are halfway to knowing your color wheel.

Secondary Colors

If we now mix all the colors that are touching each other together we get a wheel as shown below:

These three new colors are called secondary colors. Memories these six colors and their position in relation to each other and you will never again battle with your color wheel. From here you can work out how to mix any color that you need.

Tertiary Colors

From this basic color wheel, we can expand it a little further by mixing adjacent colors again to get the wheel below:

These new colours are called tertiary colours.

Each of these colors has an opposite. You find the colors' opposite by looking directly across the color wheel e.g. the opposite of blue is orange. The opposite of any color is called its complimentary color.

Objective

In this Creative Color Wheel lesson, students will design a creative color wheel using primary, secondary and tertiary colors.

Time

3 – 60 min lessons

Materials