What are Color Wheels

The understanding of color wheels is essential to the understanding of complimentary colors. As children most of us were taught red plus yellow equals orange. Well, this is correct if you’re dealing with a medium such as paint. But what if you’re working with light or a print document? When working with light the primary colors are Red, Green, and Blue. This is more commonly referred to as RGB. In print the primary colors are Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. This is commonly referred to as CMYK. The K represents black. Of course with paint the primaries are Red, Blue and Yellow.

Light color wheels are considered additive color models. This is because if you all the hues together you achieve white. The other color models are considered subtractive. If you combine all hues the result is black.

When considering complimentary colors, the color wheel helps make things easy. Whichever hue lies directly across from another hue is its compliment. Our interpretation of color is influenced physically and physiologically. Our eyes always want to see all three primary hues. This means, if dealing in light, when you look at red your eye also wants to see green and blue. This can be achieved by seeing Cyan. This is why we refer to them as complimentary colors.

Below you’ll find two color wheels. The one of the left is the pigment color wheel and the one on the right is the RGB/CMYK color wheel. The RGB and CMYK color wheel are identical except the primaries are the opposite.