colorwheel

Color wheel is a circular diagram used to organize colors by hue and to illustrate their relationships on a color continuum. It serves as a visual shorthand for color mixing, contrast, and harmony in art, design, and education. The concept originated with Isaac Newton, who arranged the colors of the visible spectrum into a circle; since then, multiple wheel variants have been developed for different applications.

In traditional art, the most common version is the RYB wheel, which places red, yellow, and blue as primaries. Mixing these produces secondary colors—orange, green, and violet—and a range of tertiary colors between them. Modern color wheels used in digital media and printing are based on different models: additive RGB, where red, green, and blue blend to white, and subtractive CMY (or CMYK in print), where cyan, magenta, and yellow produce black when combined. Some wheels also annotate value or brightness.

Color harmony on a wheel is often described through schemes such as complements (opposite each other), analogues (neighbors), triadic (evenly spaced), and tetradic or square (four colors). These schemes guide practitioners in selecting contrasting or cohesive palettes.

Limitations include that a wheel captures hue but not lightness or saturation, and perceptual differences mean equal angular spacing does not always yield equal perceptual distance. Real-world color depends on lighting, material, and device gamuts. Despite limitations, color wheels remain a foundational tool in design, painting, and color theory.