Project #7
. Create a circular color wheel.
Size:
. 12" diameter
Format:
. Centered on 15" x 20" illustration board. Each color is to be placed in circles that are 1 1/2" diameter and evenly spaced around a circle.
Materials:
. Acrylic Paints (Cadmium Red Medium, Cadmium Yellow Light and Ultramarine Blue, brushes, illustration board, colonial white paper, rubber cement, black, felt tip pen, pencil, cheap compass for drawing circles, ruler.
Reading:
. You should read Chapter 7 about color from your text. It’s a long chapter, but it contains a lot of useful, important information. For that reason you should go over this chapter carefully. This is not a chapter to read casually the night before the quiz. You should become familiar with the vocabulary list at the beginning of the chapter. These terms are crucial to your understanding the fundamentals of color theory.


This next series of assignments on color will begin to acquaint you with color terminology, the basics of additive color theory and will give you some practical investigation of color. We will start with a series of simple color mixing exercises to get you acquainted with the components of color and how (or if) color can work in a logical way.

Color Wheel
Make a 12" diameter color wheel, much like the one in the text book on page 143. Using only cadmium red medium, cadmium yellow light and ultramarine blue acrylic paints show the primary colors, the secondary colors and the intermediate colors. Once these colors have been mixed and applied to the correct area of the color wheel, indicate the primary colors with a solid line forming an equilateral triangle. Draw a second similar triangle indicating the secondary colors, but make that a dotted line. Label your colors in black pen using capital letters 1/4" tall. In executing your color wheel, keep the mixed colors even, and apply the paint smoothly and neatly.

How to do this the "easy way"

First, you will make relatively large swatches of the primary, secondary and intermediate colors as found in chapter 7 of your text. These swatches will measure approximately 4 inches by 4 inches.

They will be solid flat colors of maximum hue and brightness and we will be using them for some of the following projects as well as this one. These can be created on Colonial White paper (cheap-and bought at the bookstore). Once you have all of the colors created on swatches, you can then cut out the sections you need in order to create the color wheel. Save all of the other colors you create, (even the mistakes) because you might be able to use them on later assignments.