I’ve been making these wheels, marking in the paints in the specific brands that I have, using the ones created by Bruce MacEvoy at Handprint.com as reference. I think for me, paint mixing will be much more efficient with these in plain sight. The color wheel on the right shows the most lightfast watercolor pigments available arranged according to hue angle. The coolest yellows are at 90degrees like cadmium lemon PY 97 and green gold PY 129, moving clockwise from there, are the warmer yellows like azo yellow PY 150 and gamboge PY 153. The unsaturated yellows lie within the wheel, the closer to the center point of the circle, the more unsaturated they are. These are the iron oxides like raw sienna, raw umber, burnt sienna, burnt umber etc PBr7, PBr 11 ..along with a variety of mixtures. Then we move onto the oranges like pyrrol orange PO 73 and red oranges like pyrrol scarlet PO 255 which are the most saturated pigments we have available right now. Maimeri burnt umber is an unsaturated red orange. Then come the reds like the cadmiums and quin reds PR 108 and PR 209. PR 179 perylene maroon is a beautiful unsaturated red. Quin magenta and quin violet PR 122 and PV 19 are saturated and unsaturated hues of magenta lying at 360 degrees. Cobalt violet and manganese violet PV 14 and PV 16 are saturated and unsaturated versions of the red violet hue at 330 degrees. Ultramarine violet PV 15 red shade is a violet at 300. I have a violet blue which is marketed as smalt by WinsorNewton at 270 degrees. There are not that many lightfast pigments available in this region, I have yet to acquire a nice, juicy good saturated violet. The red blue like ultramarine blue PB 29 comes next, then a true blue like cobalt blue PB 28 which comes close to the color of the sky , greener blues like pthalo blue PB 15:3 and the ceruleans PB 36, PG 50 from 240 to 200. The blue shade of pthalo green PG7 is at 180. M grahams permanent green light is yellower and Daniel Smiths sap green is an unsaturated yellow green close to the color of foliage. PBk 31 , perylene black is a very dull greenish black. This brings us back to the yellows. The paints with the same pigments can be marketed under different names so its best to look at the pigment numbers when purchasing them. The hues can vary slightly across brands depending on the manufacturing process. Hope this clears up some confusion about warm and cool colors. If we take yellow as the warmest hue then the hues containing it as the undertone are warm. The hue directly opposite this then, voilet blue , is the coolest. Some artists like to take the orange and blue green axis as the warm cool axis.
The value wheel shows the lightness of the same pigments, the scale also corresponding to the Munsell charts. The yellows at their optimal color are the lightest at a value of 9 and 8, the oranges and teals at 7 and 6 , reds and greens at 5, magentas and violets at 4 and the blues are at 3. Carbon black comes only to about a 2 and does not reach a true black at 0.
Here are the wheels that have been developed by Bruce MacEvoy who has been kind enough to share them on his website:
High quality pdf versions :
Artist’s color wheel
Artist’s value wheel
Watercolor Journal 