How to Construct a Color Wheel
Color wheels can be a fun activity for an artist, a classroom, or anyone interested in learning about how color works. It's not just for fun, because upon completion, it's also a very useful tool when putting together color schemes. It can come in handy when painting a picture, sewing together fabrics, or even decorating your house. Before you can use it for anything, you'll need to know how to make it.
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Things You'll Need
- Sheet of paper
- Compass
- Ruler
- Pen
- Brushes
- Water color paints
- 1 cup of clean water
- Palette (or a separate piece of scrap paper)
Instructions
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1
Make a circle on the sheet of paper with your compass and make a small mark at the middle of the circle. Set your ruler on the page and draw a line straight through the middle of the circle. Move an inch or two over, then draw another straight line, again, making sure that it goes through the middle of the circle (the slices don't have to be perfectly even). All the lines should intersect right in the middle of the circle. Repeat this until you have six lines drawn, resulting in twelve more or less even, pie-like sections.
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2
Label the individual pieces, starting anywhere, in this order: Yellow, Yellow-Green, Green, Blue-Green, Blue, Blue-Purple, Purple, Red-Purple, Red, Red-Orange, Orange, Yellow-Orange.
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3
Fill in the sections with the primary colors first--red, yellow and blue--using your paints and paintbrush. Thoroughly clean your paint brush after using each color so that the colors stay pure.
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4
Clean your brush after filling in the primary colors. To fill in the rest of the chart, you'll need to know which colors to mix. To get orange, dip your brush in equal parts red and yellow, then mix them together on your palette or scrap paper. Fill in the orange piece on the color wheel. Mixing equal parts blue and yellow will give you green. Mixing equal parts red and blue will give you purple.
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5
Mix equal parts blue and green to get your blue-green. To do this you must create the green first by again mixing equal parts blue and yellow.
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6
Repeat Step 5 to fill in the remainder of the color wheel using yellow and green to get yellow-green, yellow and orange to get yellow-orange, red and orange to get red-orange, red and purple to get red-purple, blue and purple to get blue-purple.
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