I’m teaching myself Graphic Design, and I realized that I didn’t soak up much from my 8th grade art class.
Color theory isn’t just about art. It’s about science and history, too.
Before you diving into the color wheel, I learned something fascinating about the history of color.
In the 17th century, Isaac Netwon changed the way people understood color.
Before he came along, they thought that light was white, and that something happened to the light which made it turn colors.
Then, in 1676, Newton was messing with light and triangular prisms, and realized that the beam of light wasn’t actually white.
It wasn’t that something happened to **color, rather that the white light was the result of all of the colors meeting each other.
That changed everything.
The application of these colors into a graphic is the color wheel.
People had been trying to create diagrams that explained color, but most weren’t accurate. They each missed something.
Then, Johannes Itten created the modern color wheel.
He outlined 3 primary colors, 3 secondary colors, and 3 tertiary colors.
The primary colors, Red, Blue, and Yellow are the building blocks of all other hues. They are colors you can’t get by mixing.
The secondary colors, Orange, Green, and Violet are created from two of the primaries.
The tertiary colosr, Yellow-Green, Yellow-Orange, Red-Orange, Red-Violet, Blue-Violet, Blue-Green are formed by mixing a primary and a secondary color.