Color Wheel - Colors of The Color Wheel

Colors of The Color Wheel

A typical artists' paint or pigment color wheel includes the blue, red, and yellow primary colors. The corresponding secondary colors are green, orange, and violet. The tertiary colors are red–orange, red–violet, yellow–orange, yellow–green, blue–violet and blue–green.

A color wheel based on RGB (red, green, blue) or RGV (red, green, violet) additive primaries has cyan, magenta, and yellow secondaries (cyan was previously known as cyan blue). Alternatively, the same arrangement of colors around a circle can be described as based on cyan, magenta, and yellow subtractive primaries, with red, green, and blue (or violet) being secondaries.

Most color wheels are based on three primary colors, three secondary colors, and the six intermediates formed by mixing a primary with a secondary, known as tertiary colors, for a total of 12 main divisions; some add more intermediates, for 24 named colors. Other color wheels, however, are based on the four opponent colors, and may have four or eight main colors.

Goethe's Theory of Colours provided the first systematic study of the physiological effects of color (1810). His observations on the effect of opposed colors led him to a symmetric arrangement of his color wheel, "for the colours diametrically opposed to each other… are those that reciprocally evoke each other in the eye." (Goethe, Theory of Colours, 1810 ). In this, he anticipated Ewald Hering's opponent color theory (1872).

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Famous quotes containing the words colors, color and/or wheel:

    Hoot how the inhuman colors fell
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    Like human conciliations, more like
    A profounder reconciling, an act,
    An affirmation free from doubt.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    Actors work and slave—and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.
    Helen Hayes (1900–1993)

    It might become a wheel spoked red and white
    In alternate stripes converging at a point
    Of flame on the line, with a second wheel below,
    Just rising, accompanying, arranged to cross,
    Through weltering illuminations, humps
    Of billows, downward, toward the drift-fire shore.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)