Written by Abbie Cairns, Creative Learning Tutor
The colour wheel is a great way to help you understand how colours are created, and which ones complement or clash with one other.
Understanding the colour wheel is not only a great artistic skill to have, but it’s also useful when deciding on a colour palette, redecorating a room, or even picking out an outfit!
You can create your own colour wheel by following the diagram. To do this, you can use any medium you like from coloured pencils to pastels. However, if you really want to test your colour mixing skills, why not try watercolour or acrylic paint.
The colour wheel we will create here is a simplified version, to create a more complex colour wheel you can introduce more segments in between each colour.
- When creating your colour wheel start with the primary colours; red, yellow, blue – filling in the appropriate sections on the wheel. You will use the primary colours to create all the other colours on the colour wheel.
- Then move to the secondary colours. You get secondary colours when mixing any two of the three primary colours together. These are orange, green and violet. Once mixed, add
these to your colour wheel. - The third and final type of colour that our colour wheel contains is territory colours, these are colours created by mixing two secondary colours together.
You can then create brown by mixing all these colours together!You can use the colour wheel to see complementary colours – the rule is that colours that are opposite each other will go well together, such as yellow and violet. Happy mixing!
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