Tech Speak: A color wheel is a circle that has been dissected into 12 slices, each of which represents a color sitting in relation to other colors. This relationship is not random and is a direct result of the process we use to create the wheel. At the heart of this chart is the placement of our 3 primary colors at equal distances around the wheel. They effectively will split the wheel into thirds, with the slices between any two primaries consisting of a ratio of mixed primaries.

The basis of the color wheel is those 3 primary colors. But with watercolor paints there is no such thing as a perfect yellow, blue or red. These “primary” paints are dependant on the pigments used to make each paint. You each have a couple kinds of yellows, reds and blues in your collection - with a key distinction being the warm and cool families of color. Making color wheels with different combinations of primaries helps you to get to know the mixing possibilities of your palette. For this assignment, we will make a color wheel for each of those warm and cool colors. Before getting to the how of making our color wheels, let's discuss the which. Let's take a look at likely colors you may find in your collection of tubes and where they fit into all of this...