Thank you to The Color Wheel Company for providing the color tools referenced here, in order to facilitate this post.

A color wheel is an invaluable tool for anyone engaging in creative pursuits of any kind (unless, of course, you’re dealing entirely in black & white, but that’s typically not the case).  We may think of them as obvious for painting or other fine arts, but they can also be quite useful for quilting, scrapbooking, fashion – even home sewing or just putting together outfits to get dressed in the morning!  Of course, they’re helpful homeschool art tools, as well.

The Color Wheel Company sells a whole array of color wheels and related color tools, for a variety of purposes.  Most of them are not expensive, and they’re fun just to play with when you’re not using them for a project!

Basic Color Wheels

Of course, a company called “the color wheel company” would be remiss if they didn’t offer a basic color wheel.  These folks do not disappoint.  The “regular” color wheel is available in a standard size (just over 9″ diameter) and a “pocket” size (just over 5″ diameter), in English, Spanish, and French.  There’s also a giant one (25″ diameter) for teachers who may need to display it in the classroom.

This thing is packed with information!

The front side of course has all the basic colors – primaries, secondaries, and intermediates.  But there is far more to it than that!  The edges display ten different values of the grayscale.  And five segments with cutouts let you rotate the top layer and see what colors are formed when red, yellow, blue, white, or gray are added to any given color on the wheel.

The back has gradients of each hue, so you can see some basic shades and tones.  This also has a guide to recognizing various types of color schemes, such a complementary and triadic schemes.

For the Kids

For those of us with children, there’s a fun kids’ version of the color wheel, the “Colorsaurus.”  This presents much of the same information, but does it with a dinosaur design that helps maintain children’s interest.  (It can also help differentiate mom’s from the kids’, so they don’t steal yours!)

The grayscale isn’t on this one, but all of the same colors are present on the front side, including the ability to see what a color looks like with red, blue, yellow, black, or white added.

The back uses interlocking dinosaurs to show how color mixing works.  It also has some little “charts” to show what primary, secondary, and intermediate colors are, how colors combine, and which are considered cool or warm colors.

The Creative Color Wheel

The Creative Color Wheel doesn’t present as much of the basic information, but it takes the values of various hues to another level.  One side of the wheel shows tints of each color (differing degrees of white added); the other shows various shades of each color (varying degrees of black added).

This allows the user to visualize a much broader range of color combinations, because we aren’t always looking at pure blue, yellow-orange, etc.

Other Color Tools

The Color Wheel Company sells other color tools, as well.  In addition to some other specialized color wheels – like the watercolor wheel and one for gardeners – they sell other tools for working with color, in general.

One is the Pocket Guide to Mixing Color.  I couldn’t seem to get a good picture of this, because of the way it folds up.  This little booklet folds up to 3×5″ – very easy to carry in a pocket, purse, art journal, sketching kit, etc.  It contains information about tints, tones, shades, primary & secondary colors, color schemes, etc.  (This one item, however, refers to intermediate colors as “tertiary” colors which, strictly speaking, is not correct.  None of the other items I saw use this terminology.)  The back side is un-colored and uncoated so you can mix your own colors on it.

The additional color tools offered by The Color Wheel Company also include this handy Gray Scale & Value Finder.  This is 4×6″, and shows 10 degrees of value, from pure white to 100% black.  Keyhole-shaped cutouts allow users to see a color in question nearly surrounded by the various values, to make it easier to differentiate.  This is helpful for mixing colors.  (A red with a value of 1 – the darkest – and a blue with a value of 10 – the lightest – will not mix in the same quantities to create a desired purple as a red and a blue with “matching” values.)

Do It Yourself

If you really want to learn about color – or teach your students to understand it more intimately – then consider creating your own color wheel.

The Color Wheel Company has done all of the tedious work for you, creating sturdy “blank” pieces that you can use to paint/color and assemble your own basic color wheel.  Instructions are included.  (The instructions themselves provide a good bit of information about color and its use.)

Other Stuff

I mentioned that other specialized color wheels are available.  These include the Watercolor Wheel, the Gardener’s Color Wheel, the Interior Design Color Wheel, and the Web Wheel.  (This last one is pretty handy for web designers.  It specifically includes web safe colors, so you don’t design a color scheme that then ends up looking wonky because it doesn’t display properly.)

Another tool likely to be useful for a broad user base is the View Catcher.  This looks a little like an oversized slide mount with an insert.  It’s a neutral gray so as not to interfere with your compositions, and lets you  “preview” what a given scene would look like in various orientations and aspect ratios.

Other tools, the Magic Palette Color Guides, are likely to be more useful to painters than to non-painters.  The Color Value Guide shows hues and values attained by mixing 36 common artist’s paints, black, and white.  The Personal and Studio Mixing Guides are charts that show, respectively, 324 colors mixed from 18 paints and 841 colors mixed from 29 paints.  The Magic Palette Color Matching Guide is a series of long, narrow cards mounted on rings.  Each card contains swatches of artists pigments or tints/shades attained by mixing them with white or black, with cutouts so they can be held up to other colors.  Here’s a video to show how the Magic Palette Color Matching Guide is used:

Really, there is something here for everyone!

$3.50-$60.00