Whats Wrong With the Color Wheel?
The color wheel, as seen in Fig. 2 to the left, was developed by Sir Isaac Newton based on the newly developed optical spectrum. A prism, he found, split light into a rainbow. Newton wrapped the rainbow around into a circle and labeled the colors. It is, in essence, the same color wheel in use today. Unfortunately a wheel is a poor choice for a practical understanding of color mixing. A graphic representation should be visually meaningful, and the color wheel simply isn’t. A wheel implies that all of the colors are created equal when, at the risk of sounding prejudiced, they simply aren’t. Since Newton, we have developed the concept of primary colors. We will get back to the sticky issue of primary colors farther down, but for now you simply need to understand primary colors in the way they are taught in art school- they are a set of colors (usually three) A) from which you can mix all of the other colors, and B) which cannot, themselves, be created by mixing other colors. In other wor
