Color Wheel Attributes

The Artist Color Wheel consists of twelve parts:

1. Primary Colors (red, yellow, and blue} placed evenly around the circle.  

2. Secondary Colors (green, orange, and violet) located between the three primary colors 

3. Tertiary Colors are found between each primary and secondary color.  The color between yellow and , orange, for example is yellow-orange. The color found between blue and violet is blue-violet.  

Keeping these three basic kinds of color - the primary, secondary, and tertiary in mind we can define  complimentary, saturated, and compound colors.   

Complimentary are colors found opposite each other on the color wheel.  Red and green are complements, blue and orange are complements, and yellow and violet are complements. 

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Saturated colors are all the colors found around the outside of the color wheel. They contain no black, no white, and none of their complementary colors.(or opposite) colors.

Compound colors are colors containing a mixture of the three primary colors.  All the browns, khakis, and earth colors are compound colors.

In order to mix pigments into clean, saturated colors, it is necessary to include a warm and a cool of each of the primary colors in your palette. There is no such thing as a pure primary pigment.  When mixing green, for example, choose a cool blue such as cobalt blue and a cool yellow like lemon yellow to ensure there is no trace of red in the green. Using a warm yellow like yellow-orange or a warm blue such as ultramarine blue would introduce a slight trace of red into the green, resulting in a compound color.

As mentioned above, there are no true primary colors.  Therefore we must know that we are using colors that have a bias toward another color, and we must be able to distinguish which colors they are biased toward. Knowing a color's bias helps prevent artists from ending up with muddy colors when unknowingly mixing two colors that together contain all three primaries. (Red + blue + yellow = brown.)

Watercolors are the hardest paints to keep clean and bright because they often gray when mixed with colors that are incompatible.  The first rule for painting bright watercolors is to use only two or three colors in a mixture. Whenever you add a third color to a mixture, unless it is a tertiary color (those colors closest to the first two colors on the wheel), the mixture will be grayed down or even blackened.

For example, if you mix a red and a yellow, then add a red-orange, your color mixture would remain within three tertiary colors.  The mixture would retain its brightness.  On the other hand, if you added a blue to the same mixture, you would lose the brightness. 

Another rule for keeping your colors vibrant is to make sure that the previous color is completely dry before you glaze with/on another color. 

........to be continued on Color