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Understanding the basic colour wheel, including its limitations, is a great first step to understanding colour theory and colour mixing. A store-purchased colour wheel shows three primaries, plus the secondaries and tertiary colours. It’s misleading though, so don’t expect to be able to mix the exact colours on the wheel – it’s a guide.
There are different colour wheels available in stores. I’ll share what is on mine and how you can use it when painting.
Watch me demonstrate the colour wheel on my YouTube channel.
Both sides show the primary, secondary and tertiary colours. Primary colours are red, yellow and blue. When you mix those, you get secondary colours, which are orange, green and purple. When you mix a primary and a secondary colour, or just add a little bit of secondary to a primary, you get a tertiary colour. There are six tertiary colours: yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, red-violet, red-orange and yellow-orange.
On one side, it shows the approximate colour you’ll get when mixing a colour with red, yellow, blue, white or black. It also has a value guide, showing values from 0, which is pure black, to 10, pure white. This one also includes a few definitions of colour terminology, which is handy.
The other side shows each colour, and their approximate mixes when mixed with white, grey or black. Most importantly, it includes a guide to find harmonic colour palettes. It shows complementary, split-complementary, triad, and tetrad colour combinations.
This is valuable because these colour combinations can be a great guide to support you when you’re deciding on the colours you want in your painting.
A complementary painting means you use two colours opposite on the colour wheel as your main colours. When two colours are complementary, they pop. When mixed together they can be a neutral, such as gray, brown or even black. Check out my video of ultramarine blue and burnt umber to see how you can limit your painting to just two complementary colours.
Make your own colour wheel
While using a store bought colour wheel is handy, it’s just a guide. Creating your own is a valuable exercise. This will help you understand colour mixing as well as the limitations of any colour wheel. You will need to choose what type of colour wheel you want to create, and what you’re hoping to learn from the exercise.
For this post, I chose to do a colour wheel starting with three primary colours, and creating secondary and tertiary colours. I also decided to show how the colours mix with their complementaries. I’m using acrylic paint but the same concepts apply for any paint medium.
For this colour wheel, I used three primaries: cadmium-free red medium, cadmium-free yellow medium, and ultramarine blue. I chose them because they are very common acrylic paint colours.
I wanted to test out how the complementary of each mix created different neutrals. I used the primaries to make secondary and tertiary colours, and then mixed those colours with their complementary colour, or the colour opposite on the colour wheel, to see the range of colours possible with just these three tubes of paint.
For the outer ring layer, I tinted the primary, secondary or tertiary colours with some titanium white. This can sometimes help with seeing undertones, which is a valuable skill when predicting colour mix outcomes.
With this colour wheel, I could see the various deep neutrals I can get. I learned that certain mixes, such as those with more blue, are greyer, while those with more orange are generally browner. It also shows how some complementary mixes don’t get very dark. While theoretically, any complementary can mix black, it’s not completely true. The red-violet and yellow-green mix is not very dark. It only reaches about a medium-value brown hue.
Creating other colour wheels, using other colours on your palette, will help you grow your understanding of the paint colours you use. DIY colour wheels don’t need to be fancy. You can quickly do one roughly on sketch paper or cardstock. Years ago, I made some quick colour wheels just using leftover paint after finishing a painting. They aren’t fancy or tidy, but they do provide a great opportunity to learn.
Try creating your own with the primaries you regularly use. I also suggest trying various combinations of primaries. Try quinacridone magenta as your red, lemon yellow as the yellow, and cobalt blue for the blue. Each colour wheel will teach you more about your acrylic paint colours.
You can also do colour wheels testing colour mixes with secondary or even tertiary colours. This colour wheel uses two primaries, quinacridone rose and cadmium lemon, and a tertiary, cobalt turquoise.
Other types of colour wheels
Every colour wheel has benefits and limitations. I’ve seen colour wheels that show colour values or where certain pigments fall on a colour wheel. There are colour wheels with multiple primaries or three dimensional colour wheels. There is no such thing as the perfect colour wheel that shows you everything about colour.
Subtractive and additive colour mixing
It’s also worthwhile to know that this video, and all videos on my channel, talk about subtractive colour mixing. Subtractive colour mixing means that as you mix colours together, the value generally becomes darker. When you want black, you mix all three primaries together.
You may have heard of red, green and blue, or RGB, as the primary colours. That’s the additive colour wheel, which is used for mixing the colours of light. It’s used on computers and for television. Years ago, I worked in television and would have to adjust the cameras to have equal amounts of each colour, which would add up to white and various shades of grey. I still sometimes slip up and fall back into the additive colour mixing wheel, with green as a primary.
Learn more
Check out a listing of my colour mixing blog posts and videos series on my colour mixing roundup article.
Get your own
Pick up a colour wheel at your local art supply store or on Amazon: