A short-form series on historical and contemporary color wheels, and why they were built. Each episode discusses what problem a color wheel (or wheels) tried to solve, who made it, and what it gets right or wrong. We end up covering a lot of color theory ground in the process! New episodes every Wednesday.
Curated by: Color Nerd (24 videos)
This week we take on bias in color mixing. Michael Wilcox's "color bias wheel" reshaped how a generation of artists talk about paint. But his interpretation of physics and light is way off. Not only will I explain why, with lots of color science, but in this video I'll also track the gradual deconstruction of the double-primary system: four decades of color wheels that stripped away the flawed parts and tried to get closer to the truth about how paints mix. This is episode 21 of Color Wheel Wednesday, and Part 2 of "Splitting the Primaries." Thanks for checking it out! #colortheory #colorwheel #art --- BIBLIOGRAPHY Wilcox, Michael. Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green: Or, How to Mix the Colour You Really Want — Every Time. Artways, 1987 (first edition, Perth, Western Australia. Widely reprinted/revised by North Light Books from 1988 onward.) Dobie, Jeanne. Making Color Sing: Practical Lessons in Color and Design. Watson-Guptill, 1986. (I should note, she does use "warm/cool" language, but I count her wheel as sort of transitional because it is more concerned with the split-lines than with identifying specific warm/cool primaries on either side of each split.) Leland, Nita. Exploring Color: How to Use and Control Color in Your Painting. North Light Books, 1998. (This is the revised edition; the original 1985 version does not include a split-primary color-mixing system.) Mollica, Patti. Color Theory: An Essential Guide to Color — From Basic Principles to Practical Applications. Walter Foster / Artist's Library series, 2013. Moriarty, Merv, and Prue Acton. Moriarty Colour Wheel. (Developed from 2014, awarded Best New Product at the Frankfurt Art Fair, 2018; publicly launched January 2019. Hard to get outside Australia.) https://www.mervmoriarty.com Luke, Joy Turner. The Munsell Color System: A Language for Color. Fairchild Publications, 1996. (Packaged with The New Munsell Student Color Set.) Lloyd, David. The Colour Book. Crowood Press, 2007. (Accessed on Internet Archive.) Sundell, Lexi. Creating Exceptional Color with Acrylics: How to Make Color Choices That Will Take Your Painting to a New Level. Barron's Educational Series (BES Publishing), 2012. Maratta, Hardesty G. — color-chord system, ca. 1909–1912, as applied by Robert Henri, George Bellows, John Sloan and others. Documented in: Sloan, John. The Gist of Art: Principles and Practice Expounded in the Classroom and Studio. American Artists Group, 1939. (The pigment chart is called the "Dudeen color triangle" in the text, and is for some reason attributed to Sloan's friend Charles A. Winter. It's unclear why Sloan doesn’t credit Maratta). Markley, Jinjer. Color Triangle (color-mixing tool). Self-published, 2023. Sold by Wet Paint. https://www.jinjermarkley.com/colortrianglebyjinjermarkley Briggs, David. The Dimensions of Colour. "Additive Mixing, Object Colours" (This is the page that debunks Wilcox's "color impurity" interpretation of hue bias). https://www.huevaluechroma.com/045.php MacEvoy, Bruce. handprint.com — Sundell includes his watercolor pigment chart in her book.