Colours And The Colour Wheel!…

Colour wheels play a big part in art. The wheel itself is made up of six basic colours. The first side contains red, orange and yellow, and the second side, blue, violet and green. The first set of colors have a warmth to them and seem to come to meet you, with the second set moving backwards, with a cool feel to them.

This is very useful, say, if you are doing trees in a landscape picture. If you use blue and green for the distant trees it would make them look as if they are receding. Now, colours which are into opposition to each, otherwise known as complementary colours.

So, in this scenario where you put them next to each other, colour will take over and dominate. To produce vibrancy and contrast to your picture, this can give you good effects.

So, think about it for a moment. Light is responsible for how we personally observe the colours in our midst. It may be the case you just see yellow as yellow or blue as blue. This need not be so, as is obvious if you look above you to the sky.

No two skies are the same and just look how many shades of colour they may contain. The same applies to the seas with the different greens, blues and sometimes they even look black, depending on the light.

Take a rainbow when the sunlight goes through the raindrops, this is when you get the spectrum. So, if you put these colours into a ring, you have a colour wheel. So, let`s move to colour mixing!

Red, yellow and blue cannot be produced fom any other colour in the wheel for these, the primary colours, are pure. Secondary colours are made by a level mixture of the two primary colour neighbours from the circle, these being the orange, green and violet.

To take this one step further, you can mix the secondary colours with any of the three primary colours. Turquoise being what occurs if you mix blue with green. If you look at the colour labels on paints, it seems the names seem to stem from precious stones and plants.

You may have noticed that there is no black or white in the circle. As if the light beams on to something it will swallow up some of its wavelengths and then white will rebound to make up the colour that we see.

With the colour black it soaks them all up and white bounces them all back. Therefore black is a missing colour and white is all the colours made into one.

If you take brown as an example. Mix the primaries together and see how many shades you get.

Colours are so important to art. Firstly by what they can convey, like atmosphere, space, emotions, illusions, realism and excitement, are just some! But hey, they can be dull, vibrant, impasto, translucent, textured, gloss, matt, flat, light, dark, impasto transparent or opaque.