master color with the artist color wheel, their favorite tool and best friend

You can use the artist color wheel to create beautiful, successful paintings. Understanding color gives the artist a great advantage in our painting skills.

how do we use color?

Color creates emotions in our paintings.
Color gives the illusion of depth in our paintings.
We use warm and cool colors to shape forms.
Color is our guide for mixing and selecting paints for our palette.

color is just plain fun!

what is the artist color wheel?

The renowned physicist Isaac Newton gave us the color wheel in the 1600s.

He was famous for explaining gravity, but he also devised the theory of light and color.

He noticed when light goes through a prism, it is divided into the colors of the rainbow.

The seven rainbow colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and purple.

The artist color wheel is the artists' best friend.

The Color Wheel

Today the artist color wheel uses twelve colors, instead of the seven rainbow colors.

Artists have been using the knowledge of the color wheel to improve their paintings ever since.

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let's delve into color

what are the primary colors?

The artist color wheel is based on the three primary colors yellow, red and blue.

The paint colors closest to the primary colors are Lemon Yellow, Permanent Rose and Thalo Blue.

All other colors can be mixed from these three primary colors.

Primary Colors

the secondary colors

When we mix two of the primary colors together, we get a secondary color.

Mix yellow and red and you get orange.

Yellow and blue mixed together make green.

A mixture of blue and red make purple, also called violet.

When we mix two primary colors together we get a secondary color.

Secondary Colors

what are tertiary colors?

When we mix a primary color with a secondary color, we get the intermediate colors called tertiary colors.

For example, the primary color yellow mixed with the secondary green gives us yellow-green.

If we go to the other side of yellow and mix it with the secondary orange, we get yellow-orange.

The tertiary colors are; yellow-green, yellow-orange, red-orange, red-violet, blue-violet and blue-green.

Tertiary Colors

Learn more about the Color Wheel from Wikipedia

boost your painting skills with the color wheel

warm and cool colors

The artist color wheel contains warm colors and cool colors.

Red, orange and yellow are considered warm colors.

The warm colors appear to advance forward in the painting.

Blue, green and sometimes violet are normally considered cool colors.

Cool colors appear to recede into the distance.

use color to Contour the form of objects

Paint the part of an object that comes toward the viewer with warm colors.

Paint the parts of an object that turn away from the viewer with cooler colors.

Cooler and darker colors on the edge of the mangoes show them turning away from our view.

But you say, yellow, orange and red are all warm colors. You are correct. Yellow is the warmest color. The less yellow in a color, the cooler it gets. So red is the coolest.

If the edge has bright light shining on it, you won't paint it darker. But still paint it cooler to show it turning away.

Glazing with watercolor

create distance in your paintings

Colors get lighter and cooler when they move into the distance.

Paintings are usually done on a two dimensional surface, such as canvas or paper. We use color to create the illusion of distance and depth in our two dimensional paintings.

Use cool colors for the distance.

Use warm colors up close in the foreground portions of the painting.

Springtime an oil painting by artist Carol May, shows how to create distance in a painting.

"Springtime" is a prophetic painting.

In the painting "Springtime" warm colors show the sunlight shining on the mountains. Adding blue and lightening the colors moves the mountains into the distance.