Using the color wheel chart for your jewelry

Your color wheel chart for designing one-of-a-kind jewelry

Start mastering the color wheel chart and dazzle your clients with alluring jewelry.

Master the secrets of color mixing. Since perception of color is the single most emotional part of visually experiencing your jewelry, learn to express and reinforce visual information for your advantage.

Your color wheel chart is here.

Let your jewelry shine with unexpected color combinations.

The Masai tribe people are not scared at all about color, as the photo to the right shows!

To understand the color wheel, it’s vital to get the grips on how the eye receives visual stimuli and how your brain processes this information into a perception of color.

As soon as you understand how and why your clients perceive color, you’ll instantly know how to use color wisely in your jewelry.

How does a color wheel chart work for you?

Do you remember seeing spots after bright light was reflected on your eyes or after staring at a light bulb? Those spots were the afterimage of the bright light.

An afterimage is the phenomenon that occurs after the human eye has focused on any visual information. When the visual information is taken away and replaced with a blank white field, a negative image is seen on the blank space.

IMPORTANT FACTS:
The negative afterimage of any color produces its complementary color, its exact opposite. That’s where color combinations come from. Complementary colors are the negative afterimage from staring at a color long enough to produce that afterimage.
For example, if you stare at yellow, purple will appear as your afterimage. Staring at blue, will make orange pop-up; and staring at red, green will appear.

It starts with the primary colors.

The combination between primary colors yields the secondary colors. When you then mix secondary colors with the color immediately adjacent in the color wheel you get the tertiary colors.

The color wheel chart is a twelve model color combination.

The afterimage effect we just learned is the reason why color is intimately related to the psychological visual phenomenon that takes place in your eyes. Because of this visual phenomenon, complementarity between colors is what color harmony is all about.

If you want to make your jewelry using harmonious colors, stick to these basic rules.

Pull off color harmony in your jewelry designs.

Johannes Itten, the master of color theory, tells us that color harmony is achieved by means of the complementary pairs of colors. color wheel jewelry

So, if you want to master color harmony, use complementary color schemes. They are all in your color wheel chart.

No need to look anywhere else.

I have my own pocket color wheel as my chief reference for mixing colour.

I recommend you purchase one of these to keep near your workstation.

It’s very easy to use and it’ll give you the basic sense of harmony for your jewelry designs. We’ll dig into more details later on.

There are in essence five different schemes of color harmony you can find from the color wheel chart. Goethe, like Itten, was another master of color theory. He created an experimental color wheel, photo on the left.

They are structured in a geometric relationship by concordance between colors. In other words, they are geometric patterns inscribed within the radial or circular model of the color wheel.

You can move the dial of your color wheel in any five combinations corresponding to color harmonies:

Opposite ends, complementary colors,
Isosceles triangle, split-complementary colors,
Equilateral triangle, triad colors,
Square tetrad, four-color harmony,
Rectangular tetrad, four-color harmony.

The vertices of each of these geometric relationships given by the color wheel’s dial indicate the colors used in each harmony scheme.

Let’s look at each color harmony scheme in turn.

Your 12 most important colors

There are 12 color combinations from your color wheel chart. Start with the three primary colors: yellow, blue and red. From combining each of the primary colors in equal amounts you obtain the complimentary colors.

Yellow + Blue = Green
Yellow + Red = Orange
Blue + Red = Violet

Green, orange and violet are complimentary colors.

They are the combination of a shade, tint or tone of each primary color and the primary color opposite of the wheel.

How to check if you have your complementary colors right?

When you mix two complementary colors, using acrylics or oil paintings, you should arrive at a neutral gray, always.

When you combine one color with its complementary on the color wheel you create the split complementary colors.

Yellow + Green = Yellow-green
Yellow + Orange = Yellow-orange
Red + Orange = Red-orange
Red + Violet = Red-violet
Blue + Violet = Blue-violet
Blue + Green = Blue-green

For your jewelry designs, you can combine any primary color with its complimentary color or its two split complementary colors. For example, you can combine yellow quartz beads with amethyst stones and deep-violet embellishments.

Johannes Itten color wheel chart

You can also mix a split complementary color with its two corresponding split complementary colors.

Take some blue-green turquoise nuggets, add some red coral discs and some orange seed beads, and you’ve got a successful color scheme.

Triad color combinations are also extremely useful.

This is a color scheme in which three colors which are equally spaced from each other mix in a harmonious way. The simplest example: red, yellow and blue. Or you can try red-violet, yellow-orange and blue-green.

Triad color schemes are tricky to use, its best to use one of the colors in the scheme as the dominant one, while the other two serve to increase excitement.

Last but not least, tetrad color schemes are very similar to the triad scheme. The difference is that it’s a contrast between four colors in the color wheel chart. So you can mix for example violet, orange, yellow and blue (rectangular tetrad).

Take advantage of the texture, transparency, shine, size, shapes and colors of gemstones.

Take these color schemes further and add sparkle to the combinations shown here by adding metal components designed and made by yourself.

Go from Color Wheel Chart back to Color Theory

References used in this section: Ittens (1994); Zelanski and Fisher (1996)