Colour theory
The colour wheel
A circle of hues that shows which colours are neighbours and which are opposites. Newton drew the first one.
Presented by ClearTrust Free for designers, students and the curious.
A colour wheel is a circle with the hues arranged in order around it, so that red runs into orange, orange into yellow, and on through green, blue and violet back to red. It is a map, not a law. It shows at a glance which colours sit close together and which sit opposite, and most advice about combining colours is read off it.
Where it comes from
Isaac Newton split sunlight with a prism and saw a band of colours from red to violet. In his book Opticks, published in 1704, he bent that band into a circle and joined the two ends. This was a bold step, because the purples that close the circle are not in the rainbow at all. They appear only when red and violet light are mixed. Later wheels by the English engraver Moses Harris in the 1760s and by the German poet Goethe in 1810 were built for painters and dyers, and used pigments instead of light.
How to read one
The common painter's wheel has twelve steps. Three are primaries: red, yellow and blue. Between each pair sits a secondary made by mixing them: orange, green and violet. Between those sit six tertiaries, such as yellow-green and red-orange. Colours next to each other are called analogous. Colours directly opposite are called complementary. A wheel built for screens uses red, green and blue as primaries and puts cyan, magenta and yellow between them, so its opposites are slightly different. Red sits across from cyan on a screen wheel, and across from green on a painter's wheel.
What it leaves out
A wheel shows only hue, which is the quality that makes red differ from green. It says nothing about how light or dark a colour is, or how strong or greyish. Brown, pink, navy and olive have no place on it, although they are all versions of hues that do. To hold every colour you need three dimensions, which is why later systems such as Munsell's are drawn as solids, with hue around the outside, lightness up the middle and strength running outwards. The wheel is one slice through that solid.
Colours on this page
Also part of it, and being written: Orange.
Sources and further reading
- Color wheel on Wikipedia
- The Public Domain Review: Colour Wheels, Charts, and Tables Through History
- The Newton Project, University of Oxford: Newton's New Theory about Light and Colors (1672)
- Webexhibits, Color Vision and Art: Newton and the Color Spectrum
- Handprint: colour wheels
Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.