The Color Wheel

Colour is one of the most exciting tools an artist has. Before you pick up a brush, it helps to understand how colours relate to one another. Artists arrange colours in a circle called the colour wheel, which acts like a map showing which colours are neighbours, which are opposites, and which will blend to make brand-new colours.

When you mix two primary colours together in roughly equal amounts, you get a secondary colour. Red and yellow make orange, yellow and blue make green, and blue and red make purple. These three secondary colours sit between the primaries on the colour wheel, forming the six basic positions on the circle.

Beyond primary and secondary colours, there are tertiary colours — made by mixing a primary with a neighbouring secondary. For example, mixing red with orange makes red-orange, and mixing blue with green makes blue-green (also called teal). This gives you twelve positions around the wheel, and artists use all of them.

Artists also talk about warm and cool colours. Warm colours — reds, oranges, and yellows — remind us of fire and sunshine and seem to jump forward in a painting. Cool colours — blues, greens, and purples — feel calm and distant, like an ocean or a shady forest. You can use this trick to push things forward or push them back without even touching the size of the shapes you've drawn.

One last concept that colour artists love is tints and shades. Adding white to a colour makes a tint — for example, red becomes pink. Adding black makes a shade — red becomes a deep maroon. These variations help you add mood, depth, and realism to your artwork without needing any extra colours at all.