Resene Colour Wheel

Sir Isaac Newton created the first colour wheel hundreds of years ago by splitting white sunlight into red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, and blue, then connected the ends of the colour spectrum together to demonstrate natural colour progression.

A century later Johann Wolfgang Goethe studied the psychological effect of colours and discovered that some colours gave a feeling of warmth and others a feeling of coolness. Using these results he created a colour wheel based on the psychological effect of each colour with one side being the plus side of red, orange and yellow and the other side being the minus side of green, violet and blue.

Colour theory was developed further by Johannes Itten, a Swiss colour and art theorist at the Bauhaus. He modified the colour wheel using red, yellow and blue as the primary colours and modified these further to twelve hues including secondary and tertiary colours.

The Resene colour wheel, introduced some years ago and still available today, works on the same theories as those developed by Johannes Itten.

The colour wheel is designed to simplify colour selection, allowing users to work to basic colour scheme guidelines, such as complementary, split complementary and analogous, to quickly develop colour schemes.