In a colour wheel half of the wheel contains red, orange and yellow and you could say these are warm colours which seem to move forward. Whereas in the other half of the wheel you have blue, violet and green, which emit coolness and they seem to shrink backwards.

You could use this to advantage if you were doing a landsape painting. If you used blue and green for trees at the back, it would make them look distant and far away. When you use colors that are opposites in the circle they are called complementary colours.

This can be used to great effect to create strong colouring which is vibrant and a good contrast to your pictures.

So, think about it for a moment. Light is responsible for how we personally observe the colours in our midst. It may be the case you just see yellow as yellow or blue as blue. This need not be so, as is obvious if you look above you to the sky.

No two skies are the same and just look how many shades of colour they may contain. The same applies to the seas with the different greens, blues and sometimes they even look black, depending on the light.

If the sun passes through raindrops the spectrum appears. Looking at these colours, if you make a ring with these, you have a colour wheel. Which brings us to colour mixing!

The primary colours and also the, what we call pure colours, are red, yellow and blue. Note these shades cannot be made up from any other colours. Orange, green and violet are the secondary colours, with these are made from a 50/50 ratio of the two primary colour neighbours in the circle.

To take this one step further, you can mix the secondary colours with any of the three primary colours. Turquoise being what occurs if you mix blue with green. If you look at the colour labels on paints, it seems the names seem to stem from precious stones and plants.

In a colour wheel it will be noticable that there is no black or white. If light falls on an object, it will take some of its wavelengths, as it were, and bounce back others which will make up the colour before us.

Black, if you like, extracts them all and then white throws them back again. Therefore, black vanishes and white is a mix of all the colours.

If you take brown as an example. Mix the primaries together and see how many shades you get.

Colour quite obviously plays a very important part for artists. It is amazing, you can create atmosphere, emotions, excite, present illusions of realism and even control space. They can also be transparent, opaque, translucent, textured, flat, matt, gloss, dull or vibrant.

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