Color Wheel - How to use one
A color wheel is very traditional in the field of art. The first color wheel was developed by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666. He did this by dumb luck one day when he was experimenting with different lights. He passed a beam of sunlight through a prism which produced colors such as red, blue, yellow, green and cyan. About a hundred years later, a person by the name of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German writer and scientist, was studying how colors affected our moods and made us feel. He noted that blue meant quiet moods, red meant cheerfulness. He divided these colors into two groups. On the left was green to violet to blue, on the right was red, to orange to yellow. The left was the minus side, the right was the plus side. In the mid 1900’s, the color wheel scheme was developed as we know it today by Johannes Itten.
Since that point in time, there have been many scientists and artists who have studied and designed many different variations of it. There are still differences of opinion about it and constant debates about which one is more valid, but that is to be expected. When it all comes down to it, any color wheel which presents a logical sequence of colors has validity to it.
The color wheel is basically a chart of colors of the visible spectrum that is mainly used to show how other colors relate to each other.
In a traditional theory on the color wheel, the primary colors are red, yellow and blue. These are the three pigment colors that can be mixed together or formed by any combination of other colors. All of the other colors on the color wheel are formed from these three colors. The secondary colors are green, orange and purple. These are colors which are formed by mixing the primary colors. Next are the tertiary colors. They are yellow orange, red orange, red purple, blue purple, blue green and yellow green. These colors are formed by mixing one primary and one secondary.
There are many examples of a color wheel online and many that you can use interactively to create your own colors. They’re an especially helpful tool for web artists or designers who create websites, or just for individuals to play around with at home and see what kind of colors can be created. They can be found with just the click of your mouse on a search. Check them out today!