From the course: Graphic Design Tips & Tricks

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The color wheel

The color wheel

From the course: Graphic Design Tips & Tricks

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The color wheel

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- Hi everyone, John McQuade. We live in a world full of color. We tend to think of colors as separate, this is red, that's blue, but color is never seen alone, but always in the context of other colors. It's like musical notes, there's no one note that's good or bad, but it's the composition as a whole, and how those notes fit in it, that's pleasing to us or not. The question with color is, what colors go together, and how do we know? The color wheel is our tool for helping to understand that. Let's have a look. The human eye can see a narrow band of light along the light spectrum. To the left of the band, we can see is the ultraviolet range, to the right is the infra-red range. To create a color wheel, we take the rainbow of visible light and divide it into 12 equal sections. 12 is an arbitrary number, this could be six, it could be 24, it could be 64 like your box of crayons, it's just a nice easy workable number that we use. Spread them out, and put them in a circle. These are the…

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