COLOR THEORY BASICS: Use the Color Wheel & Color Harmonies to Choose Colors that Work Well Together

Have you ever wondered how some artists are able to find perfect color combinations that just seem to work every time? It's not just art, it's science. And we call it color theory.

In this video, I'm going to show you how to use the color wheel and some basic formulas known as color harmonies to choose color combinations that are appealing, cohesive and just look good. Using color harmonies, you can evoke certain emotions, create a mood or add context to your images. When you don't use color harmony, your art can appear bland and boring or so chaotic that your brain can't process it properly.

So let's start at the beginning. You may remember back at school where you learned about primary, secondary and tertiary colors. We are taught that the primary colors are red, blue and yellow.

When mixed together, these make the secondary colors green, orange and purple. Take it a step further and you'll get the tertiary colors yellow-green, red-orange and so on. These make up the traditional color wheel that was created by Sir Isaac Newton and helps us to understand how different colors work together.

The traditional color wheel is no longer the only color wheel that exists. There are other color wheels and methods that are used by artists and designers to create a bigger range of colors when mixed together. These color wheels are important and we'll talk about them in a future video.

But when it comes to choosing color combinations, the traditional color wheel is still our best resource for understanding color harmony and how colors work together to create beautiful art. There are four main qualities of each color on our wheel. The first is hue.

This is simply the color position around the wheel and the brightest, purest version of each color. Our wheel uses twelve main colors, but we can also work with all of the hues in between. Second, we have saturation.

This can also be known as intensity or chroma. This tells us how vibrant a color is. A desaturated color is greyed out and dull, while a saturated color is vibrant and strong.

Then we have value. This tells us how dark or light a color is. We can create shades of color by adding black or tints of our color, by adding white.

We can also add tone by adding gray. And finally we have temperature. The color wheel can be split into two main groups.

Warm colors and cool colors. But individual colors can also change in temperature as we move around our wheel. A warm red includes more yellow and a cool red includes more blue.

When we combine hue, saturation, value and temperature, we find ourselves with a myriad of variations of each of our twelve main colors. So how do we use all these colors together? We can use our twelve basic hues on the color wheel, along with some easy to follow formulas to create an endless collection of color combinations that look balanced, appealing and just work.

These formulas are known as color harmonies. The first and easiest is a monochromatic color harmony. This takes just one base color or hue from our wheel and uses different shades, tones, or tints to create a group of colors.

It's one of the easiest color harmonies to create and looks simple, cohesive and organized. Next, we have a complementary color scheme. This takes two colors from opposite sides of the color wheel, such as red and green or blue and orange.

This type of color scheme is great for creating strong contrast in your image. A split complementary color scheme is similar to a complementary color scheme, except one of the colors is split into two nearby colors. This keeps the high contrast of the complementary color scheme, but also adds more variety.

A triadic color scheme uses three colors that are evenly spaced around the color wheel like a triangle. These color combinations are often bold and vibrant. Tetradic colors are four colors in a rectangle shape made up of two sets of complementary colors together as one palette.

These palettes work best when you focus on one main color and use the other colors as contrasting accents. An analagous color scheme uses two to four colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. This is one of the simplest and most appealing color harmonies and works best if you choose one dominant color and use the other colors as accents.

These different color harmonies are A great guide to create colors that work well together. You can create more variety by changing the shades, tones and tints within each color palette, giving you endless ways to mix and match colors that look great. This can all be a bit overwhelming, but don't worry, after you've started applying these methods, you'll start to pick up an intuition and confidence for which colors work well together and which colors don't.

Here are some general tips to help you. First pick one dominant color. Whichever color harmony you choose, using one dominant color will create a sense of balance in your design.

You can choose one main color and use the rules of color harmonies to find other colors that work as accents or smaller details in your design. Next, use just a few colors. Simple is best.

Adding too many colors in your design can quickly become overwhelming or chaotic to your viewers. Choosing just a few colors and applying these colors can create art that is bold, simple and yet still interesting. Finally, you can use color palettes for inspiration.

Learning the rules of color theory can help you know what works well together. But it doesn't mean you have to start from scratch every time. You can find color palettes like those I've included in the Color Catalog that are inspired by nature or existing designs and naturally incorporate colors that look good together.

Choosing good color combinations doesn't have to be hard and challenging yourself to use some of these tools and formulas can expand your skills and help you to be creative in a whole new way.