Hi.

Anybody have been using this? If so does it workout better for not making mud? If you haven’t heard of it yet google it.

Well, it is actually known as, “The Real Color Wheel”, as presented by Don Jusko. When I was teaching a class in oil painting at a local recreation center, I used to provide each of my students with the address of this color wheel, so they could print out their own, if they wished. I consider it to be one of the only, scientific, color wheels that exists.

Because it actually includes the colors, Cyan, and Magenta, which most other color wheels don’t, and it aligns those colors opposite their true complementary colors, that makes it one of the most ACCURATE color wheels from a scientific, and mixing standpoint, although the “Blue” that lies opposite primary Yellow misses the mark, by a bit.

Cyan , and Magenta are two of the primary colors, and since most color wheels don’t even have those two colors represented on it, that makes those color wheels nearly useless, as actual tools, whereas Don Jusko’s Real Color Wheel can actually be used to predict resulting colors from mixtures of the other colors represented on it.

Primary colors are unique, and they exhibit characteristics that other colors don’t. With primary colors on the color wheel, it becomes useful as a true tool, rather than merely being a pretty array of colors that one can hang on their wall, to create the impression that one is an “artist”.:lol:

If avoiding mud is the goal, doing the initial stages/underpainting using highly pigmented transparent colors over white, rather than using opaque ones (or adding white), might be a big part of the solution. But (a lot of people will disagree) mud is not about color, it’s sloppy brushwork.

Don’s Real Color Wheel is a tool designed for a purpose. A lot of hues are intentionally shifted as they darken (especially the way he darkens yellows to browns). It’s up to you to determine if this is a useful attribute or not.

Don Jusko is quite a character and a real American hero imo. He did fly-overs of Cuba during the cold war and identified secret Rusian missile bases that brought us to the edge of WWIII.

Long story, short: Mixing pairs of primary colors creates secondary colors. (Primary colors of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, create Red, Green, and Blue, when mixed with each other.) . NO MUD.

Mixing a secondary color with each of its adjacent primary, creates tertiary colors. (Green, a secondary, when mixed with Yellow, a primary, creates “Yellow-Green”. Mixing Red (a secondary, with Yellow, a primary, creates Orange). Again, NO MUD.

Mixing pairs of secondaries together, creates “mud”, which is really a profoundly grayed version of the color you may have been hoping to achieve. For example, the combination of Blue, and Red will result in a very dirty, grayed, ….yes, “muddy” version of the color you were hoping to achieve–Purple. MUD. Wanna’ get “Purple”? Then, mix one secondary with its nearest primary…..namely Blue with Magenta. Result: Clean “Purple”, NO MUD.

Difficult to mix appropriately clean colors without understanding the behavior, and unique characteristics of primary colors. Don Jusko understands this, and he built his color wheel with that in mind. As I mentioned, his “Real Color Wheel” is the only one I’ve found that actually included the primary colors, Cyan, and Magenta. (Mighty difficult to determine what colors can be created by those colors if they don’t even exist on the commercially prepared color wheel.):)

Patrick, that is the color wheel I generally direct people to buy commercially. It is inexpensive and was readily available at several online retailers, I would assume it is still easily purchased.

Once owned, using the colors one has and matching then to the wheel makes it much easier to navigate color space. Taking colors adjacent on the wheel and mixing them will produce any color in between those. This makes producing “clean” purples as WFMartin notes, quite easy.

Mud is: the result of lower intensity color of a mix than one sought from mixing two bright colors together; (or) the effect of a color being juxtaposed against another where it was intended to be harmonious but fails to be so. The former is usually a result of mixing colors too far apart in color space and thus travelling through the space in a way that is less directly to the desired color. The latter concept is easily avoided by more simple measure of reducing the intensity of all colors so that the harmony is from everything essentially being mud to start with.

James Gurney advocates a similar YURMBY Color Wheel on his website, combining the RGB with CMYk. (light/digital and paint)

Nice to see someone making this version of physical color-wheels for students, designers and artists. The conventional Red-Yellow-Blue artist’s wheels used for decades are misleading.

Color wheels are just conceptual constructs for thinking about color.

Human perception, visual color, digital color (RGB) and ink/paint pigments are infinitely more complex. It’s the “infinite” that we keep stumbling-over.