The colour wheel: primary, secondary and tertiary colours

1Why this matters

Walk past the fabric stalls at Kimironko market and you see kitenge in every colour you can name. Look at an imigongo panel and you see only black, white and red, yet it is just as striking. Colour is the cheapest way to change how a room looks and feels: a tin of paint or a new cushion cover costs far less than new furniture.

To use colour on purpose, and not by luck, you need a map of how colours relate to each other. That map is the colour wheel. In this lesson you will build it, learn its vocabulary, and mix colours from it.

2Hue and the painter's colour wheel

A hue is the name of a pure colour: red, orange, blue and so on. A colour wheel arranges hues around a circle so that you can see how they are related. The wheel used for paint, dye and fabric has twelve hues and is built from three primary colours: red, yellow and blue. (Printers and screens use different primaries, but the red-yellow-blue wheel is the one used in decoration.)

3Three families of colour

1. Primary colours (P): red, yellow and blue. They cannot be mixed from other paints. On the wheel they are evenly spaced, one third of the way round from each other.
2. Secondary colours (S): made by mixing two primaries in equal amounts. Red + yellow = orange; yellow + blue = green; blue + red = violet. Each secondary sits halfway between its two parents.
3. Tertiary colours (T): made by mixing a primary with the secondary beside it. There are six: yellow-orange, red-orange, red-violet, blue-violet, blue-green and yellow-green. Their names give the primary first.

4Value: tints, shades and tones

The value of a colour is how light or dark it is. You change the value of a hue in three ways:

• a tint is a hue with white added: lighter and softer (pink is a tint of red, cream a tint of yellow);
• a shade is a hue with black added: darker and heavier (navy is a shade of blue);
• a tone is a hue with grey added: duller and quieter.

5Warm, cool and neutral colours

• Warm colours are the reds, oranges and yellows on one side of the wheel. They feel lively and cosy, and they seem to come towards you.
• Cool colours are the greens, blues and violets on the other side. They feel calm and restful, and they seem to move away from you.
• Neutral colours are black, white, grey, beige and brown. They are not on the wheel, and they go with almost any hue. Traditional imigongo uses mostly neutrals (black, white, grey and beige) with one warm hue, red, which is why its patterns look so bold.

Worked example: mixing from a small set of paints

Uwase has red, yellow, blue and white poster paint. She wants (a) green, (b) yellow-green and (c) a light pink.

(a) Green is a secondary colour: mix equal amounts of its two parent primaries, yellow and blue.

(b) Yellow-green is a tertiary colour: mix the primary (yellow) with the secondary beside it on the wheel (the green from part a).

(c) Light pink is a tint of red. Start with the white and add red a little at a time, stirring after each addition. A small amount of a strong colour changes a light one a lot, so if she started with red she would need a large pot of white to make it pale.

Practice

Solution. Red and blue. Violet sits halfway between them on the wheel.

Solution. Blue-green is tertiary (the primary blue mixed with the secondary green). Orange is secondary (red + yellow). Yellow is primary.

Solution. Green. Count six places round the twelve-part wheel from red: red-violet, violet, blue-violet, blue, blue-green, green.

Solution. A tint: cream is yellow lightened with a lot of white.

Solution. Navy is a shade of blue. He should start with the blue and add black a very little at a time, because black is strong and quickly turns the mixture almost black.