Combined Colour

There are lots of different colour wheels that have been developed to help us understand colour theory.  I studied Physics a little way back when, so I was aware of two colour wheels, but there are more!  A lot of the other wheels look at the relationships of colours so that we can pair colours together better.

The two wheels I was most aware of are more about mixing colour, one for mixing paint and the other for mixing light.  If you mix lots of colours of paint together you get an icky dark colour that isn't exactly black but is sort of headed that way.  Light is different, the more you mix together, the lighter it gets and the closer to white it becomes.

The wheel for mixing light is called the Light Wheel and it is part of the additive system where colours are added.  Primary colours are those that can not be made by mixing and they differ between wheels.  The light wheel uses three and these are green, blue and red.

We don't often get to play with the light wheel but in Olafur Eliasson's, Your Uncertain Shadow, which I saw last year at the Tate Modern, you can experience it first hand.  Several lights of different colours are setup at one end of the room and as you walk in front of them, your shadow is cast on the wall beyond.  Where there is no shadow all the colours combine to give white light.  Where all the shadows from each light overlap, no light reaches so your shadow is black.  The shadows inbetween are coloured and the colour is based on which lights combine at that point.

There are several different wheels that have been developed for mixing paint (and colours in general that are not light), but perhaps the most commonly known is the Pigment Wheel which has three primary colours, red, blue and yellow.  The Process Wheel uses yellow, cyan and magenta because mixing these colours gives brighter hues.  These wheels are based on the subtractive system, because the more colours you mix together, the more light is absorbed and so taken away.  

I wanted to do something with colours combining because Zig Zag 7 was created by a happy accident where the pattern was accidentally copied and offset.  This meant the lines overlapped and if treated as coloured paths there would be points where the colours combined.  I loved the idea of it being about light, so I decided to use white where no paths of colour were.  

So I used the three primary colours and started colouring. Where two primaries overlapped I coloured in that part as one of the secondary colours, orange green and violet (although I used purple).  My colouring was large scale and rough as I just wanted to gain a perspective and was using it for planning, but here it is...

I realise now that I used the pigment wheel.  It also quickly became obvious that to use the three primaries in a way that would give a complete pattern would make a much wider bracelet than I would want to wear.  I decided to narrow it down and combine two colours.

This time instead of using primaries to create the secondary colours inbetween, I decided to use one secondary and one primary to give a tertiary colour.  I decided to use blue and green to make blue - green or teal.  I really love teal.  I initially used quite a dark blue but as my green was a lime, it looked unbalanced, so I very quickly switched to a sky blue.  I love how it's looking and promise to post pictures soon!

This pattern would work great with combining any two colours to give a third and you could use any of the colour wheels, including some of the ones I have not mentioned here.  I may have initially thought my colours were related to light combining but as I look at the colour wheels, it's obvious that light is not what inspires my knowledge of colour.  I guess I learnt more about colour by mixing paint rather than light because mixing cyan and green light would not result in teal, I am not sure what it would give exactly but it would probably be lighter...

I have more to learn about colour theory that's for sure!