In studying the wheel it is possible to learn about warm and cool colors and how the complements will move mixtures toward or away from gray tones. The wheel may seem static, but in fact it has changed over the years.
Michael Wilcox, in his book, "Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green," argues that "the traditional three primary wheel is of limited value as it suggests the existence of colors that simply are not available, i.e. one red, one yellow and one blue which together will give good, clear, predictable secondary colors" and "there are two types of red, an orange red and a violet red; two blues, a violet blue and a greenish blue; and two yellows, one an orange yellow and the other a slightly greenish yellow." Contemporary artist and color theorist Stephen Quiller's wheel shows various yellows opposite ultramarine violet.
In his book, "Color Choices," Quiller outlines five major color schemes: monochromatic, complementary, analogous, split-complementary and triadic. Analogous, for instance, would require three adjacent colors on the wheel, such as red-orange, orange and yellow-orange to be used together. Semineutrals such as burnt sienna, yellow ochre and raw sienna would also be allowed since they are within a certain quadrant on the chart that includes the main colors.
It is easier to choose harmonizing colors from a chart than it is to use trial and error. A good exercise is to look at how Pierre Bonnard and Winslow Homer have used red and its complementary, green. In Bonnard's "Table Set in a Garden," a red chair is contrasted with a sunlit tree and a pink and white tablecloth. In Homer's "The Milk Maid," a woman in a pink and white dress stands in a green and brown landscape while a rooster with a red comb struts in the foreground.
Confident choices will reduce the number of mistakes in color judgment and will conserve your paints. If you limit yourself to three colors as in the analogous color scheme above, for instance, there is no need to lay out an elaborate array every time you are ready to paint. This kind of palette, called a limited palette, is a good choice in any case.
In "Arthur Dove," Barbara Haskell's exhibition catalog of 1974 on the Modernist painter, she includes one of Dove's unpublished notes: "There is nothing like the color of a mouse." There is a lot of gray in painting. Next to a slate gray, almost any one of the prismatic (non-earth) colors will "sing."