Understanding color theory and the color wheel is a pretty important part of creating your own artwork,
so today that's exactly what we're doing as we create this color wheel reference page.
Hi friends, welcome back. My name is Shayda Campbell.
Today we're going to jump right in, so grab your bullet journal or
sketchbook because we're going to make a reference page that you can refer back to when you're working on your art.
I've got a little color wheel here that I printed out. I'm going to post this on my patreon. It's free for everyone
so if you want to use the same wheel you can.
I'm taping that into my journal and then we're going to use a piece of graphite or carbon transfer paper
slip it under there and we're just going to transfer this little color wheel
into our journal so that we can have a nice organic journal page
without any paper stuck in but I do want a kind of perfect wheel.
So, use a sharp pencil go over that lift out up and it should look similar to this - doesn't need to be perfect.
And the first thing we're going to do is begin by coloring our wheel in with the primary colors.
Now the primary colors are the colors that make up all the other colors in the rainbow and those colors are red,
yellow, and blue, so I'm beginning with a nice red here. I'm using pencil crayons today
just simply because I have a lot of them. So I have every color and I don't need to mix.
So after you color in the red, we're going to move over
leave three sections in between and then we do our yellow.
And our third primary color moving over another three sections on the wheel is blue.
So red, yellow, and blue combine to make all other
colors and the wheel actually helps you understand how the other colors are made.
And we'll talk about that in a second.
If you struggle with mixing colors doing this little practice exercise with the color wheel can really help.
Now let's talk about secondary colors. If we mix red and yellow
right in the middle, right in between there, we get orange.
And so that is the first secondary color that we're going to add to our wheel and you can see red and yellow
combine to make orange. Orange sits in the middle. Next
we'll move over and combine blue and yellow make green. So green sits right in the middle between
blue and yellow, that's our second secondary color. Finally
blue and red mix, or combine equal parts red and blue gives us purple.
And so now we have a visual - the three primary colors are red, yellow and blue. And the three secondary colors
made by those primaries are orange, green, and purple.
And you can see looking at the wheel it's quite understandable
how each combines to make the other colors. If you're doing a little sketchbook
reference page like I am, you might want to write down the colors here below the wheel
especially since we're gonna get into the tertiaries in a second, but for now, we've got our primaries and our secondaries and
that brings us to the tertiary colors, you know, we mixed red and yellow to make orange.
We mixed yellow and blue to make green.
Now we're going to mix yellow and green to make yellow green or chartreuse.
By mixing our primary and secondary colors together, we get the six tertiary colors.
Now I'm going to mix green and blue, and that gives me blue-green or teal. And so I'll add that to the wheel.
Next we have a mix of blue and purple, and that gives us blue-purple or violet -
also known as violet, so it's a very cool purple.
After that, we'll mix purple and red that gives us magenta or red-purple. It's a very warm purple.
Moving on - you guessed it - we're mixing red and orange to make red-orange or
vermilion. It's a very dark, rich, reddish orange, and for our final color in the wheel - our final
tertiary, we're mixing yellow and orange to give us yellow-orange or amber.
So you can see the wheel really shows us exactly how each color is
mixed using those first three primary colors.
With those primaries we can mix our secondaries
of purple, green, and orange. And of course we mix the primary and secondary colors together to get the
tertiaries of teal,
violet,
magenta,
vermillion, amber, and chartreuse.
Now when you're looking at the wheel and if you're struggling with your color mixing
especially when it comes to painting, knowing your warm and your cool colors can be really helpful.
You've got warm on one side, cool on the other. If you've got a purple and you're thinking, "that's not warm enough",
mix in red. If you want it cooler, mix in blue. So the wheel can help you with stuff like that.
As a budding artist it's also super helpful to understand the color wheel and color schemes.
Now the first scheme we're going to talk about is a
triadic scheme and this scheme is made up of three colors that are equidistant on the wheel.
So an obvious example is the primary or secondary colors.
What I'm doing in my journal here is a primary triadic scheme,
but then I've modified it and used magenta, royal blue, and gold.
My 2020 bullet journal cover page is actually an example of a triadic scheme made up of those modified primary colors.
Next I want to talk about an analogous color scheme,
and that is one where the colors all sit next to each other on the wheel - could be three, four, or five
colors that flow from one to another. One that I use often in my watercolor painting is green through purple,
so green, blue, purple.,
maybe a bit of brown. I can use purple for the leaves, green for the flowers and all of it flows and blends really easily.
Another great analogous scheme is that pinks, purples, browns.
Everything blends and flows, and that's great when you're getting started
Let's talk about complementary colors:
Those are colors that are opposite one another on the wheel, like red and green, yellow and purple, or blue and orange.
A lot of these colors we use for holidays because they are super high contrast. They're exact opposites and
so we use them for Christmas,
Easter - you can see I'm putting a pastel
complementary scheme of yellow and purple in there.
And then finally, a monochromatic scheme is one
that we might incorporate into our art and that's where we take one
color and we use varying shades of that single color in order to create contrast.
So an example of this is the blue floral watercolor that we did on the channel last year.
Well friends, I hope talking about the color wheel and creating this little reference page has helped you understand how
understanding color can be a wonderful and very important tool for you to have as an artist.
Draw that color wheel out, come up with some interesting
triadic, analogous and complementary schemes, and
refer back to this page whenever you need it. Thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe.