How to Use the Color Wheel

We're going to show you how to use this thing called the color wheel to improve your work. Hey linescapers! Sonja and Gasper here and welcome back to another video. Today we're gonna talk more about color. Today we're going to talk about this thing called the color wheel and show you how to use it to mix your colors correctly, to create different tones of one single color and to choose the right color harmonies. If you haven't seen our previous video yet on the basics of color theory where we explain useful information about color, make sure to check it out. Links in the description below. The color wheel is basically a certain arrangement of colors along a circle. It was invented in the 18th century and has been a great tool for artists for centuries. It can help us with color mixing and picking the right color groups to make our images look better. You can always paint one yourself or you already have one handy one like this. Now if you don't have one yet you can probably pick one at any art supply store but if you want an identical one like we have, which is quite a good one because of all the different information it showcases, we'll put a link to it into the description below. Now ours is in german but the one we linked is basically the same one just in english. And now let's dive into three different points on how to use it to make your creative life easier. First let's look at the front side of the color wheel. On the outer ring it shows us 12 different colors. Of those 12 yellow, blue and red are primary colors. That means that from those three you can mix all other colors. If you mix them two at a time you get the secondary colors. Mixing yellow and blue produces green, blue and red produces violet and red and yellow produces orange. If you mix the neighboring colors again you get so-called tertiary colors. Blue green, yellow green, yellow orange, red orange, red purple and blue purple. To help you mix those colors there is an inner ring on the color wheel that can be turned around. It tells you what kind of color you will get if you mix red, yellow or blue to it. Let's say for example we want to add yellow to blue purple over here. We just have to turn the inner circle so they align and this window here displays what color we will get. Very helpful, isn't it? What the inner wheel also shows you is how to mix different tones of one color with adding black or white. That's called lightness of a color. You can see here what tone adding black to red will produce and if we turn it a bit what kind of tone adding white to red will produce. Which brings us to point two. Shadow, tone and tint of a color. Let us explain this just real quick. If you take just one color and add gray, white or black to it you can create a whole array of color variations. Adding gray is called tone, adding white is called tint and adding black shade. To continue we'll look at the back side of the color wheel. The color wheel shows you what kind of color variations you get by mixing it with white, gray and black. There is one more detail on this side of the color wheel. On the outer ring there is also a note telling you which colors are the cool colors and which colors are the warm colors. Cool colors are the ones from violet to yellow green and warm colors are the ones from red violet to yellow. Point three. The final and probably the most exciting thing that we're gonna show you right now about the color wheel are the color schemes. They are called color schemes or color harmonies because they look harmonious together and pleasing to the human eye. And this is what these squares and triangles in the middle of the color wheel show you. Let's look at all four of them. The first one is composed of just two colors and is called a complementary color scheme. It's always the two colors lying opposite to each other on the color wheel. It's marked with a black arrow here. So if you want to paint something in yellow and need to add one color to it that will look good in contrast you can check your color wheel which color that is and it's violet. The same would work with any two other colors opposing each other. The second color scheme is the triad. Those are three colors interconnected with a regular triangle. For example orange green and violet. The next one is the split complementary color scheme. Those are the colors connected with this narrow triangle. For example yellow green violet and red. The fourth color scheme is called a tetrad and we have it in a form of a square or of a rectangle. An example of the square tetrad color scheme would be yellow blue green violet and red orange. While a rectangular tetrad group would be yellow orange blue green blue violet and red orange. Remember you can always turn this wheel however you want and any of the color combinations will still work. One more quick tip. There are two more color schemes that are not explicitly shown in the middle of this color wheel. Those are the monochromatic color scheme just using one color and changing its lightness with gray white and black or the analogous color scheme where you use up to four colors that lie adjacent to each other on the color wheel. So what we're going to do with our color wheel is pick colored pencils in our favorite color schemes that we'll be carrying around when going sketching. And we're interested what you are going to use the color wheel for. Is it going to be mixing colors or is it going to be picking different color harmonies? Let us know. We're always happy about comments. You can drop us one in the section below. And if you want to keep improving with us make sure to subscribe with the bell. With always with the bell. You know what to do. Keep on drawing and see you next week. Bye. Bye. You know what the most popular color is in general in the population? Orange. No. Why not? It's the most beautiful color ever. Versa orange. Orange is very specific only special people like orange. Just very special people.