Acrylic Painting Bootcamp: The Color Wheel

For painting the color wheel, you are going to need three to four different paintbrushes, a cup of water, always keep your water clean, color wheel, tape to your sketchbook, some paper towel, a piece of mat board to use as a palette, you'll throw it away when you're done, and then each of the three primary colors, just small scoops of each on your palette. Tape your color wheel in your sketchbook and use a piece of mat board as a disposable paint palette. You're going to take some primary blue, some primary red, and some primary yellow. Make sure your palette is set up like this with room for mixing colors between the paint. You can go ahead and start by painting your primary colors directly on the color wheel. So that's your primary blue, primary yellow, and your primary red. So let's go ahead and start by mixing our orange. Take yellow first because it's the lighter of the colors and then add red to it and blend until you get a nice orange color and paint that in on your color wheel. Then we're going to divide your orange in half to make your tertiary colors. So split it right in half. I just drew in it with the back of my paintbrush and I'm going to add extra red to one half of the orange to make red orange. Go ahead and paint that on your color wheel and then you can add extra yellow to the other half of the orange to make yellow orange. Mix that up and then paint that on your color wheel. To make green, start with yellow again because it's lighter than blue. Always start with your lighter color and then scoop in some blue and mix that up. You'll need about 50% of each color. Mix it up, get your green, and put that directly on your color wheel. Same process with tertiary. Split the green in half, add extra blue to one half of the green to make a blue green color. Then after you get that right, paint it on your color wheel. Then do the same thing with the other half except for add yellow to make a yellow green to the second half of your green. Then you can go ahead and paint that on your color wheel. We're getting really close here. Almost finished. Last up, we will be making violet or purple. Start with red and slowly add blue into it. Again, you need about 50% of each color, half and half, to get the correct proportion and mixture. I'm making up my violet right now, painting it on my color wheel, and then you can guess what we're probably doing after that. We're going to do the same little method where we split it in half. Half will be a blue violet, so adding in blue to half of my violet to mix up a blue violet. Same kind of process here. I'm going to paint that in on my color wheel. Then to finish up the color wheel is red violet. I'm taking a little extra red, adding that into my existing violet that I had, and then painting that in for my final tertiary color. Now I have my full finished color wheel. Let it dry on your table or on the drying rack.