Week 3 ~ Colour Theory ... say what?

But you didn't think we'd be talking about colour theory, did you? I just thought I'd cover some of the basics for people who haven't heard it all before. Below, I've created a basic colour wheel comprised of wedges.

The BOLD outlined wedges are the PRIMARY colours ~ RED, YELLOW and BLUE.

The non-bold wedges are the SECONDARY colours. Secondary colours are made by mixing two primaries. So mixing red and yellow gets you ORANGE. Mixing yellow and blue gets you GREEN. Mixing blue and red gets you PURPLE.

The dotted wedges are TERTIARY colours. They're what you get when you mix a PRIMARY with one of the SECONDARY colours beside it on the wheel. So, if you mix RED with ORANGE, you get RED-ORANGE. And so on around the wheel.

However, if you mix a PRIMARY with a SECONDARY not next to it on the wheel you get ... mud. Yep, GREEN + RED = MUD, likewise orange + blue, or yellow + purple. Some of them will be reddish muds, some with bluish mud, but mud all the same.

In terms of colouring your mandalas, the farther apart the colours are on the wheel, the MORE contrast you'll have, i.e - active, vibrant, eye-catching. The closer together your colours are on the wheel, the LESS contrast you'll have, i.e. - passive, restful, calming,

Here's another diagram to help you understand colour relationships:

In the first column of small circles, you can see our Primaries, Secondaries and Tertiary (here called Intermediate). In the second column of circles you'll see 3 kinds of "colour schemes". The top one: "Analagous" is a set of any 4 colours next to each other on the wheel. This is a very restful colour palette. The middle circle "Complementary", uses two colours directly across from each other on the wheel. This will give you the highest contrast. You can also split one of the complementary colours by choosing a colour on either side. This gives you more of a range to colour with, and tones down the contrast slightly.

There is another calming colour scheme: Monochromatic, which include light and dark versions of the same colour, called TINTS and SHADES. You'll see that the last column in the chart above shows you what happens when you add BLACK and WHITE to all the colours. The HUE is the pure colour, when you add white you get a TINT ~ a lighter version. When you add black, you get a shade ~ a darker version. Although it's restful, you can still create very beautiful mandalas using only one colour, like this:

If you'd like to make your own colour wheel, I've created a single page info sheet here:

I used water soluble crayons to colour my wheel at the top of this post, but you can use any art material you have on hand ~ crayons, pencil crayons, felt pens, watercolour or acrylic paints.

You might even get inspired to make a mandala completely based on the colour wheel, like this: