Color adds excitement and interest to life. The color wheel is a tool that is helpful in understanding color balance and harmony. The first color wheel was invented by Sir Isaac Newton in the early eighteenth century. He split white sunlight into beams of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and cyan. He joined the two ends of the spectrum together into a wheel to show the progression of color.

In the nineteenth century, Johann Wolfgang Goethe began studying the psychological effect of color. He created a color wheel that demonstrated the effect color had on mood, dividing the wheel in half. Red through orange and yellow were on the plus side and were thought to produce excitement and cheerfulness. Green through violet and blue were on the minus side and were thought to produce unsettled feelings.

Johannes Itten was a Swiss color and art theorist who taught at the Bauhaus School in Germany. He modified the color wheel by developing 'color chords'. The modern color wheel based on red, yellow, and blue with twelve hues was developed by Itten.

Red, yellow, and blue are primary colors. They can"t be created by mixing any other colors, but these three colors can be mixed together to create all other colors. Combined with white or black, they can create tints and hues of these colors. When printing in color, you will find that all printer ink cartridges either have three separate ink tanks or have a tri colour ink cartridge.

Mixing two primary colors together creates secondary colors. An example of a secondary color is green, which is created by mixing blue and yellow. Shades and intensity of secondary colors depends on the proportions in which they are mixed.

The ability to distinguish color depends on light. There are two basic ways to create colors. One is to start with nothing and add color. This is known as the additive method. An example of additive color is a TV screen. It starts out black and is illuminated with color. The other is to start out with all colors – white – and subtract out the unwanted colors. This is known as the subtractive method.

Subtractive color is more familiar to most people than additive color. Mixing colors results in the absorption of some wavelengths of light and reflection of others. In most color printing, the colors used are cyan, magenta, and yellow. Color printing uses subtractive color because printed color subtracts from the light to produce colors that are visible to the eye. CMYK is a computer-based color model for designs that will eventually be printed on paper. Most inkjet printers use these four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Images viewed on a computer screen use the RGB model, or the basic colors of red, green, and blue. This is why a printed photo may not look exactly the same as it does on a monitor.

Many things affect our perception of color, including intensity of light and the color of surrounding items. Most interesting of all is the fact that each person sees colors in their own individual way, and no two people see them exactly the same.

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