The Wonderful Words for This Wednesday are “The Color Wheel”

You might be surprised to hear that I have never painted my own color wheel, UNTIL the other day.  I mean, I understand the color wheel, I know HOW to paint one.  I know how to mix secondary colors and tertiary colors and how to tint and shade colors.  I even know about complimentary colors, analogous colors, and triadic colors.  I LOVE the color wheel, but I never thought I needed to paint my own.

Side Bar: Included in this post is a complimentary color wheel cheat sheet  for you to print out for your reference!

There are two color camps in painting:

I’ve been firmly in the second camp: just buy the premixed colors you love!  There are a million pre-mixed and beautiful colors at our fingertips in every brand and type of paint out there.  Why would I agonize over creating my own mixes?  I just want to get to painting!

And that is how I’ve painted for years, however, I recently ordered a new watercolor paint called ‘Cobalt Turquoise’.   If you’ve known me for any length of time, you know this is my color and I was excited to have it in my arsenal of paint colors.

It arrived in the mail (in lots of packaging I might add) and I squeezed some out into my palette right away, added water, and tested it out on a scrap piece of watercolor paper.

I was disappointed.  It’s hard to explain why, but the color was so….flat.  It didn’t seem to have any depth and I was underwhelmed with it.  Not to mention, it cost me $15 for a 0.17 oz tube!

Since I know about mixing colors, I thought to myself, “Self, you could mix a more beautiful color than that with the colors you already have and spend zero dollars.”

Then I thought, perhaps I should make a full color wheel using the colors I already have.  And did you know that you can make several different color wheels using different blues, reds, and yellows?

So far I’ve made 2 different wheels, each with different versions of the primary colors:

These photos do not do them justice!  Now I have these two beautiful reference wheels showing the NINE different colors I can make with each triad of primary colors.  But wait!  There’s more!  I have endless variations of the primary colors to try out in color wheels and see what they make!

And here’s an ‘aha’ moment I had (I’m embarrassed to admit!), one of my ceramic palettes is MADE for this purpose! I purchased this one simply because I wanted to use a lot of colors at one time but I never knew it was made for creating color wheel colors with exactly 12 paint wells!  Take a look:

Let’s Make a Color Wheel

Supplies (affiliate links to a few of my favorite things included)

• A square of water color paper
• A protractor and a measuring compass
• A ruler
• A pencil
• A blue paint, a red paint, and a yellow paint
• A palette to mix your paints in/on
• Paint brush

Step 1

Draw a big circle on your watercolor paper and use a compass to mark every 30 degrees.

Step 2

Draw your lines to make 12 sections for your colors.  If you want to be cool like me, you can use a little bottle cap to round the tops of each section and make it look pretty, but this is not necessary.

Step 3

Paint your blue, red, and yellow sections so that there are three empty spaces between them.

 

Step 4

Now, mix equal parts of your red and your yellow color to make the secondary color of orange and paint that in the middle between the red and the yellow.

Next, mix equal parts yellow and blue to make the secondary color of green and paint that in the middle between the yellow and blue.

And yes, you guessed it!  Lastly, ,mix equal parts of your red and blue paints to make the secondary color of purple.

Step 5

Now it’s time to make the tertiary colors.  Tertiary colors are a mix of a primary color with a secondary color.  This is easy because you just mix the two colors on either side of your blank spot.

Step 6

Now pick different primary colors and do another one!  You can make a warm color wheel and a cool one if you’d like!

I’ve been converted!

I now see the benefit from mixing ones own colors and I will be making more and more of these to see what beautiful colors I can make with what I already have.

If you want to zoom in even more, take one blue and try it with every different yellow you have to see all the different greens you can make.  Do this with each blue you have and then you have a large range of green references when you are doing florals or anything requiring green.  Do this kind of study with any color you want to make.

You see how you could fill a whole notebook with color studies and swatches?  Keep good notes and you’re set!

Side bar: This is a great thing to do when you want to paint but don’t know what to paint.  Just do color studies!

Exception to the Rule

As with most rules, there are always exceptions.  Here are some colors that I think are essential to have in your arsenal of colors:

Opera Rose: This is a very bright and vibrant pink that is very hard to create with mixes, and yet it is an important color in my arsenal.  One thing to know about this color, however, is that it is considered a ‘fugitive color’, which means it is not lightfast and will fade when exposed to direct sunlight.  My favorite brand for this color is Winsor and Newton, check it out HERE.

Payne’s Gray: This is a beautiful dark bluey gray that we use a LOT in watercolor.  It varies greatly between brands, though, and my favorite brand for Payne’s Gray is Daniel Smith. Check it out HERE.

New Gamboge: This color is a very unique color.  Then original color was simply called ‘gamboge’ and came from Garcinia trees found mostly in Cambodia.  If you get a ‘cake’ of this, it looks like a horrible baby poop color, but the magic happens when you mix it with water.  Once it hits water, it’s a beautiful gold yellow color that is very transparent.  It is now called ‘New Gamboge’ as many companies stopped making it in recent years due to its toxicity and lack of lightfastness as well.  Mine came from The Stoneground Paint Company and it is beautiful!  Check it out HERE and be sure to scroll down and see what the cakes look like compared to the color on the paper – it’s magic!

Now go forth and paint your own color wheel friends!  You’ll be so glad you did.  Let me know if you did and what you discovered!

Kimberly Snider, Virtuoso, Signing Off

**Links to all the things I have to offer you, including the upcoming in person watercolor classes, click HERE.

*There are affiliate links included in this post which means that if you click on the links and purchase something from those links (amazon links only), you’ll be supporting me and I’ll get a small percentage of the purchase (at no additional cost to you).  Thank you!