~~~~~~~The Wheel (primary, secondary, tertiary)~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~While you may well know what a color wheel is (it is, after all, one of the first things any art class will go over), I hope to help you use it in depth, or to your advantage. Just to be clear, I'll cover the whole thing.
The primary colors are
Blue,
Yellow, and
Red. No colors can be used to make these, they are the purest colors we have on earth.
The secondary colors are
Purple (a mix of blue and red),
Orange (a mix of yellow and red), and
Green (a mix of blue and yellow). Each secondary color has an opposite color that is primary, and vice-versa. More on this further down under 'opposites'.
The tertiary colors are essentially third tier 'in-between' colors that are still pretty easy to mix, but will be closer to one primary color than the other. These are still just made up of two primary colors. Some of them are Red-orange, Blue Violet, Blue green, you get the idea.
A good way to think of this is in percentages. If red itself is a 100% mixture of only red, then the purest orange would be 50% yellow and 50% red in appearance (if your mixing paint, the amounts will vary, but a good, uncompromised orange will appear to be equal amounts of each, even if there's more of one color in it). The tertiary (or third tier colors) are more like a 75% and 25% mixture. In the case of Red-orange, it'll look like 75% of the color is red, and 25% is yellow. Colors in percentages other than this don't really need a tier or name, as they tend to lean close enough to one that already in place (more red in red-orange, and you'd have nearly red alone!)
It's important that all these colors are shown in the form of a wheel, as well, because not only does the wheel communicate the relationship between colors (and therefore how to mix the secondary and tertiary), but it also shows the opposites of every color- a very useful, easily overlooked feature. If you trace from Orange to the direct opposite of the wheel you'd find yourself at the primary Blue. If you start at Yellow and go across the wheel to seek its opposite, you'd be looking straight at Purple. Primary colors have a secondary opposite, and secondary colors have a primary opposite.
A good way to know the opposite of a color without referring constantly to the wheel is this:
the opposite of a secondary color will be the primary that is not in that secondary! Similarily,
the opposite of a primary color will be secondary that has none of that primary in it! Think of it this way. What's the opposite of Green? Well, green is made up of blue and yellow, so that places blue and yellow both flanking (on either side of) green on the wheel. This means that only red is left out, so red is the opposite of green.
Going from red ten, just think of the secondary that has no red in it- green.
Here's a good site that may help if you still would like it, though it caters mainly to jewelry accents, etc. It had a few good things to say about color wheels.
http://www.faceters.com/askjeff/answer52.shtml~~~~~~~
Make sense? Thank God!! Moving on!
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