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Creating color wheels are great practice for color mixing, as well as if you’re a beginner wanting to understand color theory. If you want to take it up a step and have a little bit more fun, consider making your own creative color wheel!
For this tutorial, I decided to do a star design with some negative(white) spaces inside of it. If you’d like to follow along, here’s a list of the supplies you’ll need:
Make A Creative Color Wheel Design From Scratch
*If you don’t know what type of supplies to get, I go into details here on watercolor supplies, what kind to use and buy.
For this tutorial I’m using 9×12″ Arteza watercolor paper, Daniel Smith set of 6 Essential watercolor tubes(they are Pyrrol Scarlet, Quinacridone Rose, Hansa Yellow Light, New Gamboge, Phtalo Blue, and French Ultramarine), Faber Castell Black brush art pen(size B), and Winsor & Newton Masking Fluid.
Normal color wheels are divided into 12 parts, one section for each color. But when creating your own shape, you really can do whatever you’d like. So to make drawing this out a bit easier, I decided to make it an 8 pointed star.
Colored Paper Hearts Stock Photo
First, decide how big you want the star on the paper. I’m using 9×12″ (22.8 x 30.5 cm) paper, so I figured that leaving an inch border on either of the short sides would look nice. So I made the longest sides of the star 7″ (17.8cm) across in diameter.
*I’ve darkened in the lines so you can see them better on the computer, but in reality they are drawn a lot lighter.
Next, connect all the ends of the lines you just made to form the star. Use a ruler to keep them neat and straight.
Ideas For Color Wheel
Top: connecting the marks to form the final inner star shape. Bottom Left: erasing the lines inside the diamond shapes. Right: Final drawing!
We’re going to mask over parts of the image that we want to remain white, so the paint won’t touch it and it’ll be easier to blend the colors without worry.
As I mentioned above, I’m using a set Daniel Smith watercolor tubes for this piece. The colors are in clockwise order starting from the top of the star: Pyrrol Scarlet, New Gamboge, Hansa Yellow Light, Phtalo Blue, French Ultramarine, and Quinacridone Rose. So I have 2 reds, 2 yellows, and 2 blues.
Color Theory For Younger Elementary
You can create this with just 1 red, yellow, and blue too. I wanted to see what all 6 of these colors would look like together in a bigger color wheel however, since I already did smaller watercolor color wheels with the individual colors.
If you use more than 3 colors, just make sure that they follow the circle from warms values to cool. Put them together in “rainbow order”. For example, I started with Pyrrol Scarlet, which is a warmer red(going on the red-orange side), then New Gamboge which is a slightly orange yellow, etc…
Lastly, we’re going to use a black marker(ideally it would be waterproof) to go over the lines again to make them nice and visible, and remove the masking fluid.
How To Make A Color Wheel—and 3 Other Color Theory Exercises For Beginner Painters
Don’t worry if your color wheel isn’t perfect looking. As you can see, mine does have some paint outside the lines lol. If you want, you can fix that with some white paint. And if you have any white paper showing on the
Of the lines, as long as you used a water proof marker, you can put some water on your brush and blend it to the edges. I decided to leave mine as is however. It was a fun practice piece!
Questions? Want to show off the creative color wheel design you did? Post in the comments below! Use the hashtag #creativecolorwheel on social media so we can see each others work 🙂
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