Newton’s color wheel uses the seven colors of the optical or visible spectrum. These are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. On this wheel, wedges of color are arranged on the surface in sets containing all of the colors. To compensate for the eye’s sensitivity in recognizing the middle spectrum colors, yellow and green wedges are made narrower while red and violet wedges are made larger. The disk, when rotated, blurs the colors together. The eye, unable to distinguish the individual colors, mixes the colors together and sees white. Newton’s color theory involved color additions with red, blue and green as the primary colors.
Johanes Wolfgang Goethe was interested in the psychological effects of color and he had hoped to improve upon Newton’s color wheel. Goethe’s theory involved color subtraction, which proposed that magenta, cyan and yellow are the three primary colors. The principle idea is that when secondary colors selectively subtract the components of white light, the result is black. His color wheel progressed to the development of color triads and triangles.
The CMYK color wheel is used for mixing colors in printing systems. On the 360 degree wheel, the colors cyan, magenta and yellow are the large, equally spaced primary colors and the smaller secondary colors of red, green and blue are in the spaces between the primary colors. The center is neutral. This arrangement allows for a more complete set of mixed colors when used with white and black, enabling any printed color to be duplicated.
Developed by Johannes Itten, the twelve hue color circle is based on the concept of using red, yellow and blue as the primary pigments. The equal mix of two primary colors results in secondary colors and forms a second triad of green, orange and violet. Six additional hues are made by mixing equal amounts of the primary and secondary colors.
Flower color circles begin with two sets of overlapping colored shapes (circles, hearts). The primary colors are one set and are larger and the second set is the secondary colors. The overlapping areas create blended or tertiary colors. By changing the sizes of the shapes or overlapping areas, flower-like designs are created.