Colour Wheel Colour Theory for Artists

Basic Colour Wheel Colour Theory

23/6/2020

Basic colour wheel colour theory explained – keeping it simple – put the ideas into practice straight away.

Do people keep referring to the colour wheel or colour theory without explaining what it is, why it’s helpful, or what it’s got to do with you? …confusing, right?

Only until it’s explained properly! When you understand basic colour wheel ideas, it’s like you’ve been let into a special artists’ club and get to find out all the colour secrets!

Artists colour wheel

I didn’t properly understand about the artist’s colour wheel until I started training in interior design… it was a big ‘a-ha’ moment and suddenly everything ‘clicked’…

That’s what I want to share with you – how basic colour wheel colour theory can improve your art!

We’ll look together at the basic colour wheel – we’ll understand what it’s for and understand some simple colour terms before going on to see how basic colour wheel colour theory can help us choose colours for our drawings and artworks.

In this blog post, we’ll cover:

Understanding the colour wheel
Understanding ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ colours and why they’re important
Using the colour wheel
How colour mixing works
Mixing colours for drawing

Understanding the Colour Wheel

Primary colours

All colour is made up from three colours. These are called the Primary colours:

Pure red
Pure yellow
Pure blue

Any colour at all in the world is made up of different combinations of red, yellow, and blue.

Equal amounts if any of the two primary colours make up the secondary colours.
So:

Blue + Yellow = Green
Red + Yellow = Orange
Red + Blue = Purple/Violet

Secondary colours

Then, if equal amounts of the primary colour and the adjacent secondary colour are mixed, they create the tertiary colours.

So – if blue is added to green, blue-green is produced – which is positioned between blue and green on the colour wheel.

And – if yellow is added green, yellow-green is produced – which is positioned between yellow and green on the colour wheel.

In this way, the colour wheel builds up as below…

Artist colour wheel showing all colours, including tertiary colours just added

Tertiary colours are added

Warm & Cool Colours

The terms ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ colours are used a lot in art instruction and colour theory and are very useful to know about – so it’s really good to understand what they mean and how you can use this knowledge in your own art.

The terms let you know how the colours ‘feel’ – do they create a warm ‘feeling’ or a cool ‘feeling’?

Warm colours – are on the red and orange side of the colour wheel – ranging from red-violet through to yellow-green.

Warm colours

Cool colours – are on the blue side of the colour wheel – ranging from pure violet to pure green.

Cool colours

Think about an artwork of a sunset, with rich oranges, reds, and pinks – the artwork will give you a warm feeling. This is because of the warm colours used.

Now, think about an artwork of a winter scene filled with cool, frosty blues – the cool colours make the scene feel cold to you.

A little confusingly, individual colours can also be termed ‘cool’ or ‘warm’…

For example, a cool pink or red would be one that veered towards the cool side of the wheel - so it would be a purpley-red or purpley-pink.

A pure red in the centre, with a cooler (purpley) red to the left and the warmer (orangey) red to the right.

A warm blue would be one that veered towards the red or orange side of the colour wheel – a purpley-blue is a warm blue compared to a ‘cool’ blue (a pure blue or teal blue/green-blue).

The pure blue is in the centre, with the warm blue (the purpley one) to the top and the cooler blue (the greener one) to the bottom.

Note how in one of these examples, the purpley shade is called warm and in the other it’s called cool – this is because it’s named in relation to the main colour and not as an absolute – the purpley-blue is warmer than the pure blue, the purpley-red is cooler than the pure red.

You can buy colour wheels made of card and cut into a circle with another circular card attached.

These are really useful as they show you a whole range of tones of a single colour, not just the colour at full intensity as I’ve shown you on my basic colour wheel.

This makes it much easier to identify where the colours you’re using, or thinking of using, might fall on the colour wheel, and helps you to make accurate practical decisions around identifying colours. I whole-heartedly recommend you spend the small amount to invest in one.

Artist colour wheels with interactive colour chooser spinner

The two cards turn and you can pick one colour from the colour wheel, turn the card, and see which other colours will work best with it. You can also use the colour wheel as a guide to mixing colours for your art – I’ll show you how to do this later.

Once you get the hang of using your colour wheel and colour theory, I think that you’ll find it really useful and it will help you a lot with mixing and selecting colours for your drawings and artworks.

I use mine all the time! If you would like to get one, make sure you buy an artist or interior design colour wheel and not one that’s used for web design (called an RGB colour wheel).
The RGB colour wheel is used for creating colours on computer monitors using the colours of the light spectrum (rather than paint colours).

The RGB colour wheel uses red, green, and blue as its primary colours (not red, yellow and blue like we want) – so avoid this unless you want some weird results! Look for an artist’s colour wheel instead!

Colour Mixing with the Wheel

Let’s explore colour mixing for paint or drawing techniques…

When you learn colour mixing skills you can:

Save money by mixing your own colours
Choose from an almost unlimited palette of colours and not feel restricted by the few in your tin or box
Select colours that work beautifully together

Here we’ll look at using the colour wheel to help you mix colours for paint or blend colours for drawing projects.

When you understand how the colour mixing wheel works, you can use the colour wheel as a guide to mixing colours for your art – knowing that red and yellow make orange can help you make the right colour choices for your art.

Knowing this colour wheel theory is absolutely essential if you’re mixing paints. It’s also extremely helpful if you’re mixing colours in different ways – like if you’re drawing in a translucent medium like coloured pencils or alcohol markers or blending colours with a medium like pastels.

Use the colour wheel to help you mix colours for your art

How Colour Mixing Works

Mixing paints

Watercolour, gouache, oils, acrylics also pigment markers that work very much like paint
Take a little of each colour, two or more, and mix them together on a palette
Plan carefully and choose colours that are close together on the colour wheel. For example:
- Mix together red and yellow for a basic orange
- Or add a little yellow to orange to take it more towards yellow

Using red and yellow to mix orange, just like on the wheel

When you’re mixing paints, you can also add white to your colour mix and mix together to create a lighter TINT.

Or you can add black into your colour mix and create a darker SHADE.

Or you could add a mix of black and white (that we call a ‘grey’) into your colour mix and create a TONE.

A red and yellow mix with black added (left), grey added (black & white) (centre), and white added (right).

In this way, you can easily create a wide range of interesting colours for your artwork.

I’ve spoken about using colours close to each other on the artist’s colour wheel to mix colours together – this gives you the most vibrant and fresh colour mixes.

But you can also use other colours from your colour mixing wheel – you can look across the colour wheel from your chosen colour and add a little of the colour that’s opposite.

This will dull down, dampen or mute your colour, which can be very useful indeed. It creates a far more natural colour than just trying to mute-down with black. Try it and see!

Mixing red and green

This technique is also a great way to create neutrals – a range of natural-looking greys and browns – far more rich, nuanced and warm than the quite stark ‘pure neutral grey’ created from a pure black and pure white.

For natural neutrals, try mixing equal amounts of:

Yellow and purple – or -
Red and green -or -
Blue and orange

…and see what colours you end up with!

Perhaps you remember splashing about with poster paints as a little kid - and that feeling of confusion and disappointment when those beautiful bright colours you picked to paint with disappeared into a sea of muddy brown sludge!

This is the same idea – and is the ‘mud’ created when you mix ALL the colours (which is, basically, just red, yellow, and blue, since all colours are made up of combinations of these)…

Mixing ‘mud’ from the three primaries, red, yellow, and blue.

But now, you can do it deliberately-on-purpose to create a whole range of rich, earthy browns – have a go and see what happens!

When you’re mixing paints, you can always add a little more of one specific colour to take your mix a little more in that direction – use your artist colour mixing wheel to help you.

Using teal (blue-green) to take a standard blue into a cooler more petrol-blue direction.

If you’ve managed to create a really dark ‘mud’, it’s best to revive your colour by adding a little of your ‘mud’ to a fresh colour – rather than the other way around. This is because once it’s gone really dark and muddy, it can take a LOT of your new colour to turn things around…

It’s easier to keep adding your ‘mud’ gradually into a new orange-yellow or red, for example, than mixing a little red into the mud and expecting it to make much difference…

Happy experimenting! Have fun!

Mixing Colours for Drawing

Using the artist colour wheel and colour theory to mix and blend colours for drawing is slightly less straight-forward than mixing colours for paints…

But it’s the same basic principles – so do make sure that you understand the principles above about how colour wheel colour theory works for mixing colours for paints.

To apply this mixing colour theory to drawing, we need to understand a little of how our drawing materials work...

Pigment or Paint Markers

Pigment or paint markers work very much like paint and allow you to mix the colours right on the page or on a separate palette – so use the section above for opaque drawing materials like this where you can mix the colours together in almost the same way as paint.

Use pigment markers like paint

For drawing materials that are slightly translucent:

Coloured pencils including watercolour pencils
Alcohol markers
Pastels

For drawing materials that are slightly translucent, because the colours are slightly see-through, when we put one colour on top of another, we can still see a bit of the original one underneath…

But it doesn’t look quite the colour that we originally put down – the new colour has changed how the colour looks.

This is because it’s created a colour mix, right there on the page and not on a mixing palette.

Colour mixing with translucent drawing materials

The colour-mixing process works slightly differently for translucent drawing materials like these alcohol markers

When we understand that this is what’s happening, we can go back to our basic colour wheel colour theory and look at which colours are next to each other or close together on the colour wheel to see (roughly) how the colours will look when we mix them together as we draw.

Duller, muted and muddy colours can be mixed together in the same way using opposite colours on the colour wheel, just like for the paint.

Exploring Mixing Colours with Different Drawing Materials

Coloured pencils can be layered up and blended together to create your colour mix – see more about that in my free PDF on coloured pencils here…

Layering up orange and yellow with coloured pencils

Watercolour pencils can be layered and blended dry on the page, then water added to create the colour mix – or you can use a little of the pencil core in water as if it’s a watercolour paint – more about this in my free PDF on coloured pencils…

Colour mixing with Inktense watercolour pencils

Adding water to Inktense coloured pencils to blend colours beautifully

Alcohol-based markers, like Promarkers, can be layered up or blended together - find out about that in my PDF on markers here…

Pigment markers or paint markers are mixed together on the page, more like paint, as we’ve just seen - I cover this, quite briefly, too, in my PDF on markers…

I cover creating graduated blends with alcohol markers in my markers PDF

Pastels can be layered up and blended together - see my free pastels PDF here…

Subtle blends of colour with pastels

Also oil pastels – there is also a free oil pastels PDF too…

Mixing colours when using oil pastels

Where to Go Next

This blog post is an extract from my free drawing resource 'Get Creative with Colour' where you can start learning about using the colour wheel to create a few simple colour schemes that can really get your art to 'pop'...

Find the Free Creative Colour Resource here...

When you're ready to build further on this knowledge, I also have a more in-depth self-study course on Confident Colour & Composition to help you improve your art techniques with both colour use and composition - both vital to creating art that people love...

Find the in-depth self-study Confident Colour & Composition Course here...

Get Creative with Colour free drawing resource

Colour and Composition self-study course for artists

Confident Colour & Composition self-study course for artists

Start your learning journey here...

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