Color Wheel Masks

I was excited to find James Gurney's blog which is an amazing resource for him to share with the world. I was surprised to see his entry on color wheel masking. I made my masks a few years ago and find them really useful. Gurney's masks and initial color wheels go way beyond mine and I plan to emulate and learn from his.

First my color wheels which include an elementary school Grumbacher Color Compass, my own painted wheel (I'll be making a Gurney style one with a middle value neutral instead of dark/black at the center now), A Quiller Wheel (copyright S. Quiller) which shows actual tube colors at their "correct" position on the wheel, and my own copy of that using my own actual tube colors.

The masks are just expressions of standard color schemes and help me see the range of colors involved. Seen here are the masks for ... a complimentary color scheme, a sort of split complimentary, a slice that reveals analogous schemes, and a triadic scheme. All of them can rotate and show infinite variations.


Here is the piece left over from making the analogous scheme mask. It's useful for showing an "everything but" scheme. In this example yellow is mostly eliminated leaving a selection of colors that contains a complete complimentary and a wide slice of the wheel but are still broadly unified.



Here are the same masks on top of my copy of the Quiller Wheel. Never hesitate to mix colors your own way but for time's sake this method helps identify specific sets of tube colors you might use in a scheme.







At the same time I made the masks I made these small examples of the main analogous schemes, the split complimentaries (with the little "rabbit ear" shapes), the main triadic schemes, and even the four way schemes. It's great to have examples of these things right in front of you in actual paint from your own tubes.