by Sonia Alamar
Hello students, today we are going to talk about colour wheel and colour properties. First of all, I recommend you to open the file “Colour wheel” in order to make easy the understanding of this podcast.
Why is important know about this colour wheel?
The Color wheel is our tool for understanding which colour go with what. As you know, the colour wheel represents the range of visible light made into a circle. It helps us to understand how colour relates one to another. So, at this point, let's start describing colour wheel structure.
The basic colour wheel has 12 basic hues. 3 Primary colours, 3 secondary colours and 6 tertiary colours. To make things easy, think of a Hue as one of the twelve colours on the mixing wheel.
So, Let’s to me explain this step by step…
These colours are called primaries because, without them, the other colours wouldn't even exist. Primary colours can't be made through mixes of other colours. These are the most important idea, starter hues of the colour wheel and all the other colours on the wheel are made through mixes of primary hues. When two primary hues are mixed you get secondary colours.
Red plus yellow creates the secondary hue of ORANGE, yellow and blue make GREEN and blue and red make VIOLET. Orange, green, and violet are the secondary hues of the colour wheel. When you mix a primary with a secondary colour, you get a tertiary colour.
There are six tertiaries: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue- violet, and red-violet.
And there you have it: all 12 colours of a standard colour wheel.
At this point is important to say that every colour is part of colour next to it, which is part of the next and the next, all the way around the wheel. Colours in common are the basis of the colour relationships. For example, Blue is common with to all seven colour located on both side of it.. green and violet are the secondaries that contain blue. The same relationships are made with other primary colours as yellow or red.
Colour also has darkness and lightness, or as we usually called it “value”. To show the value, the colour wheel has more rings; two big rings for the dark shades and two small rings for the light tint. A shade is a hue plus Black, and a tint is a hue plus White. Five steps represent what is actually a continuo gradient from black to white. The tint or the shade can fall anywhere in the sequence.
To sum up this point, we can say that colour wheel has five concentric rings from dark to Light, shade are the big one and tint is the small, and hue are in the middle. From here it's important that you understand that each slice of the colour wheel it's just a placeholder for an infinite number of dark, light, muted and bright versions of that colour.
Another important use for the colour wheel is that there are six basic colour relationships that help designers to create harmonious compositions:.
In this case, we are talking about colour scheme (colour strategies)
Primary: they are rarely seen as a trio except for childre’s product.
Secondary: have a lot in common (two share blue, two shares yellow, two shares red), so harmonise easily.
Monochromatic: Dark, medium and light value of a single colour. It has not colour depth, but provide the contrast of the dark, medium and light that it’s so important to good design. Analogous: Adjacent colours that share strong undertone. Create pleasing low- contrast harmony.
Complement: direct opposite colour in the wheel. The complement brings contrast. Typically complement is used in the smaller amount.
Split complement: Mixture of a low-contrast beauty of analogous colour, plus the added of an opposite colour Colour pallets can be warner/cooler, darker/ lighter, stronger/quieter and so on by using more or less of some colour.
To finish, I’d like to remark that a color wheel is a reference tool. Its purpose is to help to understand how colours are related. Its 12 hues and 48 combinations represent a full spectrum of colour but are only a tiny portion of the infinity of colour we can found in nature. You’ll have the opportunity to practice all those concepts in class. But, in order to know if you‘ve understood the topic please answer the quiz in the virtual classroom, before the next class. See you soon.
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