Color wheel Totally Explained

Everything about Color Wheel totally explained

A color wheel or color circle is an organization of color hues around a circle, showing relationships between colors considered to be primary colors, secondary colors, complementary colors, etc.
   Artists typically use red, yellow, and blue primaries (RYB color model), so these are arranged at three equally-spaced points around their color wheel. Printers and others who use modern subtractive color methods and terminology use magenta, yellow, and cyan as subtractive primaries.
   Color scientists and psychologists often use additive primaries, such as red, green, and blue, and often refer to their arrangement around a circle as a color circle, as opposed to a color wheel.
   The arrangement of colors around the color circle is often considered to be in correspondence with the wavelengths of light, as opposed to hues, in accord with the original color circle of Isaac Newton. Modern color circles include the purples, however, between red and violet.
   Intermediate and interior points of color wheels and circles represent color mixtures. In a paint or subtractive color wheel, the center is usually (but not always) black, representing all colors of light being absorbed; in a color circle, on the other hand, the center is white or gray, indicating a mixture of different wavelengths of light (all wavelengths, or two complementary colors, for example).
   Some sources use the terms color wheel and color circle interchangeably, though the one term or the other may be more prevalent in certain fields or certain versions as mentioned above. Some reserve the term color wheel for mechanical rotating devices, such as color tops or filter wheels. Others classify various color wheels as color disc, color chart, and color scale varieties.

History

An in-depth history of the color circles, wheels, spirals, triangles, charts, and other order systems has been published, as a chapter of an e-book, by Sarah Lowengard, focusing on the eighteenth century.

Colors of the color wheel

Typical artists' paint or pigment primary colors are blue, red, and yellow. The corresponding secondary colors are green, orange & violet. The tertiary colors are red–orange, red–violet, yellow–orange, yellow–green, blue–violet and blue–green.
A color wheel based on RGB (red, green, blue) or RGV (red, green, violet) additive primaries has cyan, magenta, and yellow secondaries (cyan was previously known as cyan blue). Alternatively, the same arrangement of colors around a circle can be described as based on cyan, magenta, and yellow subtractive primaries, with red, green, and blue (or violet) being secondaries.
Most color wheels are based on three primary colors, three secondary colors, and the six intermediates formed by mixing a primary with a secondary, known as tertiary colors, for a total of 12 main divisions; some add more intermediates, for 24 named colors. Other color wheels, however, are based on the four opponent colors, and may have four or eight main colors. Goethe's Theory of Colours provided the first systematic study of the physiological effects of color (1810). His observations on the effect of opposed colors led him to a symmetric arrangement of his color wheel, "for the colours diametrically opposed to each other… are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye." (Goethe, Theory of Colours, 1810 ). In this, he anticipated Ewald Hering's opponent color theory (1872) .

The color circle and color vision

A color circle based on spectral wavelengths will appear with red at one end of the spectrum and violet at the other, and with a wedge-shaped gap representing colors which have no unique spectral frequency; these extra-spectral colors, the purples, are rather formed by the additive mixture of colors from the two ends of the spectrum.
   In normal human vision, wavelengths of between about 400 nm and 700 nm are represented by this incomplete circle, with the longer wavelengths equating to the red end of the spectrum. Complements are located directly opposite each other on this wheel. These complements are not identical to those in pigment mixing (such as are used in paint), but when lights are additively mixed in the correct proportions will appear as a neutral grey or white.

   The color circle is used for, among other purposes, illustrating additive color mixture. Combining two colored lights from different parts of the spectrum may produce a third color that appears like a light from another part of the spectrum, even though dissimilar wavelengths are involved. This type of color matching is known as metameric matching.

Color wheels and paint color mixing

There is no straight-line relationship between the colors mixed in pigment, which will vary from medium to medium. Whereas with a psychophysical color circle, the resulting hue of any mixture of two colored light sources can be determined simply by the relative brightness and wavelength of the two lights, a similar calculation can't be performed with two paints. As such, a painter's color wheel is indicative rather than predictive, being used to compare existing colors rather than calculate exact colors of mixtures. Because of differences relating to the medium, different color wheels may be created according to the type of paint or other medium used, and many artists develop their own individual color wheels. These will often contain only blocks of color rather than the gradation between tones which is characteristic of the color circle.

Color wheel software

A number of interactive color wheel applications are available both on the internet and as desktop applications. These programs are used by artists and designers to simplify the task of picking matching colors for a design.

Color schemes

Color schemes are logical combinations of colors on the color wheel.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Color Wheel'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://color_wheel.totallyexplained.com">Color wheel Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.