How to Create a Hue Circle

It is easy to create your own hue circle as long as you understand how a color wheel works. Basically it involves making your own palette that consists of the colors that you want to use in your work of art. 

Making your own color palette in a way that puts complimentary color, hues and values together helps you create the most visually interesting painting possible.

When making your own color wheel be sure to look at the relative lightness or darkens of a color and how the contrasts work with each other.

Color contrast is a value that can help separate objects in space. Each hue also has a value even though it is the term mostly used to describe the pure spectrum colors like red, orange, yellow green, blue and violet. These are the basic colors of the rainbow.

To create your own hue circle simply put all of these colors on a palette in a circle and them mix and match the as you see fix.  You can make any color in the world simply by mixing these pigment primaries together in different combinations.  If you mix them all together the result is black.

At the very least your painter’s palette should consist of what are known of the painter’s primaries. It is based on the nineteenth century theory of color that says that any color can be created from red, blue and yellow. However the flaw in this particular color wheel combination is that you cannot make clear greens or purples with it.

To have a larger color selection you need to create a palette made out of the printer primaries which include magenta, turquoise and yellow. These are the colors used as the basis for color printing.’

When you mix colors on a palette you can desaturate them and lighten them to make a tint by adding white.  You can mix with black to create a shade or you can add gray to the color to lighten and darken the value of the color. This will result in what is known as a tone of color.

A skilled painter can use a color wheel to create color illusions. One great effect is known as simultaneous contrast. This occurs when a color seems to change when it is placed against different backgrounds. 

Another great effect is called color proportions which mean that the largest area of your canvas that is covered with one color could affect the appearance of other colors. The painter that can master simultaneous contrast and color proportions is very talented indeed.

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