color wheel with primary and secondary colors

You wouldn’t want to decorate a room entirely in bright orange and red, for example. This is partly due to the visual appeal of balancing warm and cool colors from different sides of the wheel. The color directly across from a color is considered complementary, even though the two colors may seem like sharp contrasts to each other. If you’re looking at a traditional color wheel, you’ll notice that warm tones are traditionally on the right, while cooler tones are traditionally on the left. The color temperature for neutral colors can fall on either the warm or the cool side, an important distinction when you’re trying to create a look and feel for a room or make a specific statement with an outfit. Neutral colors include shades of black, white, gray, tan and brown. The combinations are easy to figure out, thanks to the names given to the tertiary colors: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet and red-violet. These are the colors formed by mixing a primary color with an adjacent secondary color. Understanding Tertiary ColorsĪ complete traditional color wheel also includes colors known as tertiary colors. On the color wheel, secondary colors are also positioned at equidistant points from each other on the color wheel, positioned between the two colors used to make them - orange between red and yellow, violet between red and blue, and green between yellow and blue. Mixing red and yellow produces orange, mixing red and blue produces violet and mixing yellow and blue produces green. Secondary colors - orange, green and violet - are each formed by mixing two primary colors together. Photo Courtesy: Jose Miguel Hernandez/Moment Open/Getty Images

A simple color wheel typically displays 12 colors, with the primary colors located at equidistant spots around the wheel.

Primary colors - red, blue and yellow - exist independently and can’t be formed from mixing two other colors together. All the individual colors on the wheel are divided into three main categories: primary, secondary and tertiary colors. These colors are typically referred to as complementary or harmonious. The design of the wheel is pretty genius itself, with all the colors positioned so that the colors directly across from each other complement each other. The concept of a circular color wheel was first developed by Sir Isaac Newton in the 1600s - yes, the same genius who developed the laws of gravity. Color theory involves the science behind mixing and combining colors to create specific effects, and the cornerstone of color theory is the color wheel.

Color wheel with primary and secondary colors