Paint A Color Wheel in Gouache

1. Welcome: Hi everyone. I'm Larissa. I'm teacher illustrator and surface designer in Melbourne, Australia. And welcome to the fascinating world of colors. In this class, we're going to learn the basics of color wheel. We'll find out what colors are included in the wheel and how they are relating to each other. It seems easy, but if you really dig into it, you'll see a lot of terms are used in this area, such as hue, saturation, value, teens, tones and shades. So what are they exactly? How are they relating to colors? We're going to find out about all that in this class. To put what we learned into practice, we'll paint a number of color wheels in gas. We will identify what colors goes into what part of the color wheel. We will also explore colors with various saturation and values. Through these color studies, we will have a good understanding of how the color wheel works and how different colors are formed. So get your painting supplies ready. We will have a play with the colors. 2. Class Project: In this class, we'll be doing two tasks. One is to paint our own color wheel, which has the primary colors, secondary colors, and tertiary colors. The other task is to use primary and secondary colors as examples to explore different tens, tones and shades. We will paint three more color wheels. The first one shows colors getting lighter and lighter. The second one shows colors getting darker and darker. The last one shows colors getting less and less saturated. Feel free to share your work when you finish, you can upload your color wheels to the projects and resources section under this class without further ado. Let's get started. 3. Supplies & Resources: In order to take this class, you will need your painting supplies. I'll be using Gag. You can follow along if you use acrylic or aquylic gage. However, the class doesn't work well with watercolor because watercolor performs differently. When it comes to color mixing. You will find a lot of methods I show you in the class don't really apply to watercolor. I just want to clarify that at the start, I'll be using the following supplies in this class. Gage paint, paint brushes, watercolor paper, paint palettes, a drawing compass with a pencil, a protractor, a ruler, a water container, and cloth or paper towels for the pinks, brushes and watercolor paper, I use Windsor and Newton products. You can use whatever brand you like as long as they work for you. For the pink palettes, they can be any type. I typically use this palette that looks like a flower. Because I find it useful when painting the color wheel, I can prepare the three primary colors and the three secondary colors in just one place. I will explain more about it later in this class. But that doesn't mean you have to get a palette like this. You can just use whatever palette you have. The drawing compass, the protractor and the ruler are to help us draw the color wheel. They will save us a lot of time. I have also prepared a guide for this class. It shows how the color we works and explains the relevant terms. You can download the guide in the Projects and Resources tab under the class. If you're watching on the Skillshare app, you can find the link to the class guide under discussions. 4. The Color Wheel: Let's talk about the basic color will in this lesson. What is it exactly? The color wheel is a circular diagram that shows colors of the light spectrum. It also explains the relationships between these colors. You will find three types of colors in the color will, primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary colors are the ones that cannot be created by mixing two or more other colors. The three primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. They are the foundation of all other colors being created. For example, if we combine red and yellow, we have orange. If we mix yellow and blue, we have green. If we add blue to red, we have purple. These three colors, orange, green, and purple, are secondary colors. We can still create more colors with these six colors. If we combine red and orange, we have red, orange, some color it. Vermilion. Combining orange and yellow, we have yellow, orange, or amber yellow mixes with green. We have yellow, green or statues green mixes with blue is blue, green or we call it teal. When we add blue to purple, we have blue, purple or violet. And when we add purple to red, we have red, purple, or magenta. By mixing primary colors and secondary colors, we have these six colors called tertiary colors. And all the primary colors, secondary colors and tertiary colors make up the color will. 5. Drawing a Color Wheel: Now that we understand how the basic color wheel works, let's start making one for ourselves. We will be using these methods, tools, to draw a color wheel. Basically, what we're drawing is a big circle that is divided into 12 equal sections. And we're going to place the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors in these sections. Imagine it as a birthday cake, and you need to cut it up into 12 slices. That's just like what we're going to do. So have a look at how I paint the color will in the following demonstration, if you have the same tools at hand, you can just follow along. 6. Painting Primary & Secondary Colors: Now the blank color wheel is ready. We can start painting it with primary colors. So I'll grab the three primary colors from my gouache pink set and I'll put some in this palette. I'll start with the color red. You can just pick anywhere in your color wheel to start painting the first color, and I'll show you how to organize the other colors. After that, I decided not to stick to the edge of the color wheel when painting the colors because I think the loose ends would make my color wheel a bit more interesting. You can of course, paint your color will the way you want. Now to move on, we need to count three sections. And then in the fourth one, pint your next primary color. And I'm going to paint the color yellow here. And once again count three sections. And then in the fourth one is the last primary color, and it should be blue in here. Now that the primary colors are in place, we can start mixing them to create secondary colors in my palette. Here you can see I have laid out the paints. I'm going to mix red and yellow to create orange in here. Mix yellow and blue to create green in here. And then mix blue and red to create purple here. You may also notice there's a proportional difference between each of these colors. There's more yellow than red here, more yellow than blue here, and a little bit more red than blue here. The reason why I do this is because some colors are stronger than the others. Take the three colors here, for example. You can see the sketch marks underneath red and yellow, but you can barely see the sketch marks underneath blue. That means blue is more opaque than red and yellow. If you take a closer look at both red and yellow, you will see the sketch marks under yellow are more obvious than the ones in red. That means yellow is more transparent than red. That's what I meant by some colors are stronger than the others. By comparing the transparency or opaqueness of the colors, we can say blue is stronger than red. The red is stronger than yellow. That's why we need different proportions of these colors when we make certain colors. Now to put orange in the color wheel, basically we just put it in between red and yellow. And same with green, between yellow and blue, and also purple between blue and red. 7. Painting Tertiary Colors: Now what is left on the color wheel are tertiary colors. Can you remember what are tertiary colors? When you mix a primary color with a secondary color, you will get a tertiary color in the color wheel here, all we need to do is to mix every two colors to fill in the blank in between. Before I start mixing the colors, I'll bring in a different pink palette. Because I will keep using these six colors for the next task. I don't want to mess them up right now. I will grab some of the paints from here and then mix them up on the different palette. And there you go, we have completed our color work. 8. Hue, Saturation, & Value: When working with colors, there are some terms we need to understand and we're going to talk about them in this lesson. Hue is basically the color, all the colors in the color will, red, blue, green, purple, and so on. They're all hues. In painting, a hue means a pure pigment without adding any white or black saturation. Saturation means the intensity of the colors. Saturated colors tend to be more vivid, whereas desaturated colors tend to be more washed out or muted. Value value means how light or dark a color is. If a color has a high value, that means it's moving towards white. If a color has a low value, it's moving towards black tint. A tint is a hue mixed with white. If you add white to a pure color, you're creating a tint of that color shade. A shade is a hue mixed with black. If you add black to a pure color, you're creating a shade of that color tone. A tone is a hue mixed with gray. If you add both black and white to a pure color, you are creating a ton of that color. Do they all make sense? If you find it hard to take ulolin? I'll share with you my tips on understanding these terms. A hue is a color, add white to a hue, makes a tint, Different proportions of white added to a hue creates a variety of tints. Add black to a hue, mixes a shade, different proportions of black added to a hue creates a variety of shades. By creating tints and shades of a color, you are changing the value of that color. Add gray to a hue, makes a turn. Different proportions of gray added to a hue creates a variety of turns. By creating turns of a color, you are decreasing the saturation of that color. With these terms in mind, let's have a look at this color wheel. It has a lot more colors than the one we just painted. We will use the terms we just learned to analyze this color wheel. Can you tell me where are the hues in this color wheel? I mean, the pure colors? Yes, they are the ones from the very inside of the wheel. What about the ones just outside the hues? They look lighter than the pure colors. They are called tints Is a tint. Again, when you add white to a color, you are creating a tint of that color. How about the colors in the next circle? They look muted comparing to the pure colors. They are called tones. Can you remember what the tone is? When you add gray to a color, You will get the tone of that color. Lastly, in the outer circle of the well, you can see these colors are darker than the hues. They are called shades. Search your memory one last time. What is a shade? When you add black to our color, you are creating a shade of that color. I'm sure you can see this color wheel is more advanced than the one we just painted because it has lots of colors with a variety of values and saturation. It really helps us understand the complexity of colors and how each of them is formed. When it comes to creating art and designs, we can't always use pure colors. We do need some colors that are bright, dark, and muted in order to create fabulous work. That's why it's so important for us to understand how colors with various tones and shades are formed. In the next few lessons, we'll practice painting. Tints, tones, and shades. 9. Painting Tints: In this lesson, we'll practice painting teens. We'll use primary colors and secondary colors as the foundation of this activity. And then we add white to these colors to make them lighter and lighter. 10. Painting Shades: We just finished painting lighter colors. Now let's paint darker colors. Remember, painting shades is to add black to a pure color. We will again use primary and secondary colors as the foundation. Then we add some black to create shades. Then we add black to make the colors become darker and darker. 11. Painting Tones: Lastly, we'll practice creating muted colors. And that means painting tones. I'm sure you guessed it. We will add gray to the pure colors, so they become less saturated. Before I start, I have pre mixed some gray already because it's not like using white or black straight out of the tube. We do need to mix black and white to create gray. Getting the color ready beforehand will make our painting process smoother, just like what we've done with the secondary colors. 12. Parting Thoughts & Thank You: Thank you so much for taking this class. I hope you have fun painting your own color wheel. And had a good understanding of how colors work. As this and creatives we know more than anyone the importance of colors in our creative work. So getting to the bottom of it can take our work so much further. And understanding the color wheel is a good start. If you have any questions about this class or you just want to give me some feedback, feel free to leave a comment under the Discussions tab in this class. You can also DM me on Instagram or send me an e mail. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.