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Have you ever found yourself mixing colors only to create something entirely useless?
Or do you remember the time when you didn’t like your painting because the colors didn’t look synchronized?
If you said yes, then it is time to master the art of choosing the right colors. To get started, all you need is every artist’s holy grail — the color wheel. This little tool is the perfect solution to a customary problem faced by many artists. If you haven’t already started using it to determine your color palette, you might by the end of this blog.
What Is A Color Wheel?
Even if you don’t know anything about a color wheel, you might have still come across it at some point in your life. Remember that circle of colors from where you can choose different shades of any color? You might remember it from MS Paint or some photo editing software on your phone.
Voila! That’s your color wheel.
Formally put, a color wheel is a visual representation of different colors and the relationship they share with each other. All these colors are placed systematically on the wheel, based on their color category, hues, and how they affect the other colors. A color wheel chart is an important part of color theory; something every artist must know about.
There are different versions of this tool and you may also find it in a triangle or other shapes. Depending on the purpose, some color wheels may include a different number of colors. For example, some may only include primary and secondary colors whereas others may have tertiary and neutral ones too.
Importance of Color Wheel for an Artist
An artist may require several tools beyond their own skills, to create a perfect piece of art, and a color wheel is one of them. Especially if you are someone who is still learning your way around colors, this little tool can be your best friend.
1. To Find Harmony in Colors
One of the most important uses of a color wheel is to find colors that bring harmony to your composition. Color harmony is the relationship between two colors that can create an aesthetic composition when placed together. These are usually colors that you’ll find next to each other on the wheel and are also known as analogous colors; the closer they are, the better they look with each other.
Similarly, you can also use the wheel to locate complementary colors. These colors are known to enhance the intensity and vibrancy of your painting by creating a contrasting color scheme.
2. Create a New Color Palette
As an artist, your color choice can depend on several reasons. It may include your mental state, preference for one color over another, or just what you feel comfortable with. For example, you could be someone who always works with warm colors, but now you want to try a new palette. How do you determine the colors that not only do justice to your painting but also to each other?
Your answer is the color theory wheel. Your choice of colors plays a key role in determining the mood of your painting and how the viewers perceive it. With the help of a color wheel, you can explore different colors and how they can impact your final results.
3. Learn To Mix Colors More Accurately
When you don’t understand the relationship between different colors, or their individual tones, mixing them becomes a matter of being a fluke. More often than not you will end up adding colors more or less than what is required because you lack the fundamental knowledge. This not only demoralizes you as an artist but also leads to wastage of colors which are often quite expensive.
To avoid this problem, you need to brush up on your basics and learn about color theory. However, this includes a lot of factors such as color categories, how to create a new color, tones of colors, etc. If you find it overwhelming to learn all of it in one go, use the color theory wheel. For example, if you can’t remember how to make purple, just look at the color wheel. You will see it placed between blue and red which means you need to mix these two colors to create purple.
4. To Enhance Emotions
A major factor that determines the emotion of your painting is your choice of colors. You can use the color wheel to pick colors that are associated with specific emotions. For example, warm colors like yellow are associated with energy, happiness, and light. On the contrary, cool colors like blue are associated with melancholy, sadness, and loneliness.
You can juxtapose warm and cool colors if you want to create more dynamic art or represent tension. On the contrary, to make a serene atmosphere, use analogous colors and pick complementary ones if you want more depth. Having a color wheel can help you easily locate these colors and make your pick.
5. Avoid Excessive Light or Dark
A good painting gets its depth from the interplay of light and dark, which just like other elements must be balanced. If you fail to strike a balance of light and dark in your composition, your painting will lose its appeal.
This simple problem can be avoided with the help of a color wheel. Firstly, you need to find the color temperature you want to work with. If your dominant temperature is cool colors, you will build your composition by incorporating hints of warmth to accentuate the painting. This allows your composition to balance out the light and dark edges for each other. Additionally, it compels viewers to take some time to explore the subordinate temperature and spend more time with the painting.
6. Avoid Disharmony
Just like how you can use the color wheel to find harmony, you can also use it to avoid disharmony in your work. It will help you avoid colors that don’t go well with each other. As important as it is to find colors that work for each other, it is equally important to spot the ones that don’t. So you can use your color wheel to avoid creating excessive contrast because it can make the work repelling.
7. Learn to Replace Black
A lot of good artists avoid using black color in their palette. Instead, they create darker tones of different colors to work their magic. For some artists, black is a difficult shade to work around, and doesn’t go well with other elements. Others find it unnatural, especially when it comes to landscape paintings because nature doesn’t have black color. What you see is actually the darkest version of another color, that now looks black.
Hence, once you start understanding the relationship of colors with each other, you will find it easier to replace colors with each other. For starters, you can create black by mixing equal parts of your primary colors i.e. red, yellow, and blue. In other instances, you can mix equal parts of complementary colors, which will cancel out each other and give a black appearance. This trick works brilliantly in most cases, because a black shade like this has a subtle underlying tone of the original colors used to create it, thus looking more natural.
The Color Wheel Is Your Art Guide
Now that you know the benefits of using a color wheel in your art, you can use it to take your color game to the next level. However, you must remember that it is just a tool to guide you and you can always mold it into your vision and needs. Not every artist follows the same rules and what works for others might not apply to you.
So you need to use your best judgment to decide how you want to leverage this knowledge of color theory in art. After all, it is your painting and only you know what you want to make out of it.
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