A color wheel is a circular chart, often resembling a pie chart, which diagrams the relationship of colors to one another. Artists use the color wheel to begin studying the basics of color theory in painting and other 2D media. Creating a color chart is a fundamental color study exercise used to familiarize students with mixing colors. Color wheel exercises can be done in any type of paint, such as watercolor, oil, acrylic or tempera.
The Basic Color Wheel
Create a color wheel on a piece of watercolor paper or canvas paper, depending on the material being used. Draw a large circle on the paper and place six evenly spaced boxes to fill with color on the outside of the circle. Use a paintbrush to fill the boxes with color around the circle in this order: yellow, orange, red, violet, blue and green.
Mix a Palette with Primary Colors
Use only the colors red, yellow and blue to create a color wheel. The primary colors are colors that cannot be made through mixing other colors, but these colors can be mixed to create all color. Mix these colors to fill in the color wheel: yellow+red=orange, red+blue=purple, and blue+yellow=green. Vary the amounts of pigments to make red-orange or blue-glue. Set out a painter's palette with red, blue, yellow and black and white if desired, then paint an image such as a still life or landscape.
Use a Complementary Palette
Complementary colors are colors that lie on opposite sides of the color wheel. Take the color wheel and draw a line directly through the circle, across to the opposite, from the primaries red, blue and yellow. Notice how green is opposite of red, orange is opposite of blue and purple is opposite of yellow. Mixing opposite colors together creates a neutral color or a brown. Draw a straight line on the paper, then add five to 10 evenly sized boxes on the line. Fill the box furthest to the right with orange, and the box furthest to the left with blue. Mix the blue and orange together so that the color gradually changes from orange to blue on the scale. Paint a picture using only these two colors and white, without any black. See the range of light and dark that can be created with two complementary colors.
