New Downloadable Primary Color Wheel

A primary color wheel that easily displays primary, secondary, warm and cool colors will help students learn the basics of color theory.

It’s never too early to start adding some very basic color theory to art lessons for elementary students. Even kindergarteners can absorb the idea that blue, like the ocean, is a cool color and red, like fire, is a hot color. Those concepts not only apply to literal hot and color places they might draw, but can also be applied to emotions too.

Searching for visual aids to explain these ideas can lead to lot of complex color wheels that are found all over the internet. Young artists don’t need to learn about tertiary and analogous colors just yet. Charts that included that info and more make even my head hurt.

My solution? I created my own color wheel just to keep color concepts very basic. Just one easy-to-read graphic that shows the primary and secondary colors, and where the warm and cool colors are.

Need a quick overview? Primary colors are colors that can’t be mixed from other colors. They are red, yellow, and blue. Secondary colors are colors that result from mixing two primary colors. They are orange, purple and green.