Color Wheel Primer

By Jennifer Huskey, HGTV.com
Illustrations by Bob Clouse
When you're decorating, choosing a color scheme can be a perplexing task. It's hard enough whittling down your choice to one or two colors--but then to have to mix and match even more of them into an eye-pleasing scheme? Sometimes it's just too much to ask.

So before you turn back on the world of color, get a grasp of the color wheel and how it works.

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The Basic Wheel
In 1666, Sir Isaac Newton performed a prism experiment in which he discovered that pure white light contains the full spectrum of colors--in effect, creating the world’s first color wheel. From there, philosophers, scientists, artists and designers have continued studying the components of color and its physical, psychological and philosophical effects.

Newton's wheel is made up of 12 colors, which are classified into three categories:

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Primary colors are red, yellow and blue.
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Secondary colors - orange, green and violet - are created by mixing primary colors.
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Tertiary colors are a combination of a secondary color and a primary color next to it. They include yellow-orange, red-orange, red-violet, blue-violet, blue-green and yellow-green.