What is the Color Wheel?
Chromatic circle
What is the Color Wheel?
A color wheel is a tool in which the colors visible to the human eye are arranged.
In this chromatic wheel, a range of colors interact according to their hierarchy (primary, secondary or tertiary colors) so it is used as a resource to make harmonic or contrasting color combinations.
Traditional color wheel (RYB)
It is the color wheel popularized by Goethe in the seventeenth century, characterized by the presence of six colors, three basic primary colors and three secondary colors.
- Primary colors : red, yellow and blue (red, yellow, blue or RYB)
- Secondary colors : orange, green and purple.
Natural color wheel
It arises from the studies of the nature of light by scientist Isaac Newton, who discovered that if a segment of natural light is distributed in a circle, the order of the colors results in a chromatic circle. Two models or forms of color organization emerged from this scientific advance: the additive and the subtractive color wheel.
Additive model (RGB)
It is a model that proposes the creation of a new color through the addition or addition of other colors in the spectrum, which leads to the white tone, the sum of all the colors.
- Primary colors : red, green and blue ( red , green , blue or RGB).
- Secondary colors : yellow, magenta, and cyan.
Subtractive model (CMYK)
This model proposes the creation of a new color from the subtraction or subtraction of color. This would lead to the pitch black, which is the absence of light.
- Primary colors : cyan, magenta, and yellow.
- Secondary colors : red, green and blue.
In this case, the acronyms are represented by the primary colors (cyan, magenta , yellow) and black ( key) , which is what is obtained by mixing the first three.
Color combinations with the chromatic wheel
The color wheel is used as a tool in the visual arts to achieve color harmonies that achieve a desired effect. In this sense, there are several methods to make combinations:
- Monochromatic harmony : as its name indicates, it is based on the use of a single color, only in this case it is played with several tones. For example, use various shades of blue.
- Analogous harmony : it consists of combining colors that are close to each other on the chromatic circle. An example might be to use yellow and orange.
- Complementary harmony : consists of using colors that are in opposite positions within the chromatic circle. For example, orange and purple.
- Three-color harmony : involves the use of three colors that are equidistant on the color wheel, as if they formed an equilateral triangle. A classic example is the combination of the colors yellow, blue and red.
Origin of the color wheel
Already in the 15th century there were some representations of primary colors organized in geometric shapes such as wheels, rectangles, hexagons, etc.
However, it was the playwright and scientist Johann Wolfgang Goethe who in his work Theory of Colors , published in 1810, exhibited for the first time a chromatic circle of six colors, three of them primary (they cannot be obtained from the mixture of other colors) and three secondary colors (colors obtained by mixing primary colors).
Although scientific advances have expanded the range of colors that can be perceived by the human eye, Goethe's color wheel is still used today, especially at primary education levels or in basic art studies.
Currently there are several types of color circles. In all of them the maxim is fulfilled that indicates that warm colors are located on one side of the circle (generally on the left side) and cold colors on the opposite side.