What is a Color Wheel?

What is a color wheel? If you're serious about choosing just the right colors for your interior design and décor, you should invest in a color wheel. It will help you choose complimentary colors that will highlight and blend with each other, instead of clashing with each other. You can find color wheels at most art supply houses and at some paint stores. A color wheel contains primary, secondary, and highlighting colors that agree with each other. It's a moveable wheel, so you can line up colors in your spectrum and see what colors balance each other. It's extremely fun to experiment with them, and they come in handy when planning colors for your craft projects, too. Very inexpensive, they're usually cheaper than a can of paint, and you can use them for every room in your house.

Primary and Secondary Colors in the Color Wheel

The primary colors on any color wheel are red, blue, and yellow. That's because you can combine these colors in different amounts to make any color in the rainbow. These colors are spaced out equally on the wheel. Spaced between these primary colors are the secondary and highlight colors, often called "cool" and "warm" shades. The warm colors include reds, yellows, oranges, and a few purples. These colors tend to make a room seem warmer and more inviting, and they tend to make rooms seem smaller than they are, so they're a great fit for larger rooms. Cool colors, on the other hand, like blues, greens, and the rest of the purples, tend to make a room seem more serene and calm, and they make a room look larger, too. Most color wheels contain 24 different shades of the primary colors for you to experiment with.

Using a Color Wheel

When you use a color wheel, you can line up the colors you're interested in using, and then look directly opposite those colors to find the colors that are most complimentary to them. You can also look at the secondary colors on each side of your primary colors to find harmonious blends. Using these colors on a color wheel can help you create the interior design and décor of your dreams, and it's easy to see how it could apply to everything from paint colors to upholstery and drapery colors. A color wheel can also tell you what colors don't blend with each other. The colors that don't line up with your chosen hues are the ones to avoid using in your home design.

So, now you know what a color wheel is and how to use it effectively, so get going on your new home décor!