296
Part 4 The Inside Story
The Color Wheel
Color relationships are easy to
understand when you learn a few basic
principles. The standard color wheel
is the tool used to best illustrate these
principles. The
color
wheel, 11-4, is the
most commonly used tool to understand
the basis of all color relationships. It is
made of three concentric rings: an outer,
middle, and inner ring. The middle
ring of the color wheel consists of three
types of colors: primary, secondary, and
tertiary.
Yellow, red, and blue are the
primary
colors. They are the basic colors and
you cannot create them by mixing other
colors. However, mixing, lightening, or
darkening the primary colors can make
all other colors.
Orange, green, and violet are the
secondarycolors.Mixingequalamounts
of two primary colors produces these
colors. Orange is a mixture of red and
yellow. Green is a mixture of yellow and
blue. Violet is a mixture of blue and red.
Look again at the color wheel. Notice
each secondary color is located halfway
between the two primary colors used to
make it.
The other colors in the middle
ring of the color wheel—yellow-green,
blue-green, blue-violet, red-violet, red-
orange, and yellow-orange—are the
tertiary colors,
or the third level of
colors. Another name for the tertiary
colors is intermediate colors. The names
of tertiary colors reflect the names of fl
the two colors used to make them—an
equal mixture of a primary color with
a secondary color adjacent to it on the
color wheel. Note that their names
always have the primary color listed
first. For example, blue-green is correct fi
but not “green-blue.”
The lightest color on the color wheel
is yellow and it is always at the top of the
wheel for that reason. Violet is the dark-
est color on the color wheel. It is directly
opposite from yellow at the bottom of
the wheel.
Color Characteristics
Each color has three characteris-
tics: hue, value, and intensity. Various
tools illustrate these characteristics.
For example, the color wheel shows
hues and some values. Separate scales,
such as the color rendering index (CRI),
show color values more completely as
well as color intensity. You will learn
more about the color rendering index in
Chapter 17.
Hue
A hue, or color name, is the color in
its purest form, with no added black,
gray, or white. It is the one characteris-
tic that makes a color unique. It is what
makes red different from blue and green
different from yellow. It is the specific,fi
individual nature of each color.
Value
The
value
of a hue is the relative
lightness or darkness of a hue. The
middle ring of the color wheel shows
the normal values of hues. The normal
values of some hues are lighter than the
11-3
This fan of
different paint
colors represents
a portion of the
many colors that
exist in nature.