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Colour Wheel

Art · Year 3–Year 6

Tap a colour: primary, secondary or tertiary, and what is opposite it.

About the colour wheel

Twelve colours round a ring, red at the top. Tap one and the board names it, says whether it is a primary, a secondary or a tertiary colour, and what it is mixed from. Nothing is typed and nothing is dragged.

It is the red, yellow and blue wheel on the wall of every primary classroom, and it uses the same twelve paints as the colour mixing tool, so the orange a class mixes there and names here is the same orange.

Turn Opposites on and the colour six steps round the ring is marked as well, with the two of them meeting in the middle of the wheel. Complementary colours are hard to talk about from a printed chart and obvious the moment they are side by side.

Everything the board says comes off the ring rather than a list: a primary is every fourth step, a secondary sits two steps from each primary it is made of, a tertiary is between a primary and a secondary, and opposite means six steps round. It cannot tell a class that red-orange is a secondary colour.

This tool names colours; the mixing tool pours them. If a class wants to see red and yellow becoming orange, that is the one to open.

How to use it on your whiteboard

  1. 1Tap a colour on the wheel. Its name, its kind and what it is mixed from appear beside it.
  2. 2Tap it again, or press Clear, to go back to the question.
  3. 3Press Next colour to work round the wheel with a class.
  4. 4Turn Opposites on to mark the complementary colour and show the pair together in the middle.
  5. 5Ask which colours cannot be mixed before you tap them: there are only three.

Questions

What are the primary colours?
On this wheel, red, yellow and blue: the three you cannot mix from anything else. Printing and screens use different sets, which is why a printer has cyan and magenta in it, but red, yellow and blue is the wheel a primary art lesson uses and the one that matches the paint on the table.
What is a tertiary colour?
A primary mixed with the secondary next to it, which gives the six colours between the named ones: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-purple and red-purple. In the pot they are two parts of one colour to one part of another.
What are complementary colours?
The two opposite each other on the wheel: red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange, and the tertiary pairs between them. Put side by side they make each other look brighter, which is why they turn up together on posters and in paintings.
Why is my paint tray’s orange not the same as the board’s?
Because paint is not light, and no two oranges are quite the same. Every colour here is a real paint colour chosen to look right, and the point of the wheel is where a colour sits and what it is made of rather than an exact match to a particular tube.