3.5 Colour wheels and relationships
Colour wheels (Figure 3.63) have been used for hundreds of years as a method of working with colour – to understand mixing colour, creating colour palettes and relationships, and selecting colour in software applications.
Many early colour wheels used the RYB (Red, Yellow, Blue) primaries alongside secondary and tertiary colours in a wheel, but today, with digital technologies influencing how we create works that use colour, it is accepted that the additive colour primaries (RGB) (or CMY for subtractive colour) are the standard used in software applications as screen-based media work with additive colour (pixels are made of light).
Topics covered:
- Interactive colour wheel and colour relationships:
An interactive colour wheel created using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which you can manipulate to create your own colour schemes and palettes with definitions and examples of colour relationships, such as analogous, complimentary, split-complimentary, monochrome, tetradic, and triadic. - The properties of colour
Definitions and interactive examples of colour properties such as hue, chroma, saturation, value, tints, shades, and tones. - Colour properties learning activities:
- Colour charts – Pantone and Munsell systems
Information about colour charts and systems used in industry.
