What happened to the colour wheel?

One of the most common starting points for the study of colour is the construction of a painted ‘colour wheel’ or ‘hue circle’.  

Instead of beginning colour studies with the traditional 2-dimensional colour wheel, we recommend beginning with a 3-dimensional framework for organizing and describing colours. Introducing the concept of hue planes and building basic 3D colour models at an early stage provides a comprehensive foundation for 21st century colour knowledge.

Our starting point for exploring and expanding the way we experience colour in our world begins with looking, seeing and describing colour in all its variations. We begin by adding adjectives such as vivid, muted, pale and dark to the hue names.

Colour is complex, and our relationship to colour is filtered by our culture, our experiences and our memories. By reducing our means of dealing with colour to a two-dimensional circle of the most vivid hues, we are missing out on all the nuanced variations which inform how we see and communicate with our world.

The term ‘colour wheel’ suffers from a common misconception: equating the terms colour and hue. Hue is one of the dimensions or attributes of a colour, and is not synonymous with the term colour. A related misconception is that ‘black is not a colour’. Understanding the 3-dimensional nature of colour attributes allows us to correct this misconception. Blacks, whites and grays are all colours: they just lack the attributes of hue and chroma. The ability to describe colour with all its attributes – like hue, lightness/value and chroma – at an early stage of studying colour, ultimately gives us a firmer grasp on understanding our visual world.

Another problem with colour wheels is that there are so many different types. Which one is the ‘best’? Which one is ‘correct’? Using only three so-called ‘primary’ paint colours to mix all others is actually a misconception. The physicality of the paint-mixing process means that it is impossible to produce ‘all’ colours from a limited set of three.

Each set of three primary paint colours – whether it is comprised of is red, yellow and blue, or cyan, magenta and yellow coloured paints, will result in a different set of mixed paint colours. Even the choice of a specific paint colour – whether it is a cadmium red light or a naphthol red, or from different manufacturers - will result in a different set of mixed colours.

Understanding that there is no ‘true’ or ’correct’ colour wheel requires a deep understanding of the way colour works. Colours are what we perceive when we receive light into our eye: our human visual system constructs the particular colour we see, taking the overall context into account. This is an extremely complex process. By working with a painted colour wheel, we are focusing on colorants, and the way they behave and interact with each other. Colorants, or coloured media, are not the same as colours. Using the colour wheel with all its ‘relationships’ as the guiding principle for how colour works, and what colour is, is overly limiting. 

Bottom Line: A colour wheel with its associated colour ‘relationships’ both restricts and redacts what colour actually is. When we start to study colour by learning the terminology of ‘Traditional Colour Theory’ – like primary, secondary, tertiary, complementary – colour becomes housed within a conceptual framework. We start with exploring three-dimensional colour relationship. In our approach, the experiential nature of colour is first and foremost.