An Introduction to Color

So we know now that color is all an illusion (see “Color Doesn’t Exist,” below), but I’m basically obsessed with the color wheel. I love circles, I love rainbows, I love grids, and I love Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727), who invented the wheel.

I’ve been making color wheels and charts for years. I don’t usually follow all the rules exactly, preferring instead to make a chart or a wheel that suits my subjective preferences. But in this case, I made a legit wheel. I attempted to mix the truest, wheeliest, rainbow-ist colors I could find. I’ve been told with paint you can mix all the colors through the three primaries (red, blue, and yellow + white), but I haven’t found that to be the case.

Have you ever noticed how many shades of red are available in paint? Hundreds. Some are great for mixing orange, some are great for mixing purple, pinks, earth tones, flesh tones, etc.—but I’ve never found a single red that can do it all. So for this project I used two blues, one violet, one green, two yellows, and about six reds. (Red is a tricky one to nail down—I haven’t found the Holy Grail red yet.)

See the opposite page for a breakdown of basic color terms I use in this book.

Primary colors. Blue, red, and yellow.

Secondary colors. Purple, orange, and green. Each secondary color is a mixture of the two primaries shown on either side of it on the wheel.

Tertiary colors. Further “in-between” colors, seen here as pop-outs. A tertiary is made by mixing a primary and a secondary shown on either side of it on the wheel.

COLOR WHEEL GROUPINGS

Monochromatic colors. One or more value shifts of the same color.

Analogous colors. Two or more colors that are next to each other on the wheel. Shown at left: green, blue-green, and blue.

Complementary colors. Two colors that lie opposite one another on the wheel. Shown here: blue-green and red-orange.