Color Wheel & Harmony Finder

About the Color Wheel & Harmony Finder

Pick a base color by dragging on the wheel, moving the sliders or typing any color code, then choose a harmony rule. The matching colors appear on the wheel as markers joined to the center, and below it with their HEX, RGB and HSL codes, ready to copy or open in the Color Palette Generator.

You can switch between two wheels. The RYB (artist’s) wheel is the painter’s circle described by Johannes Itten, with red, yellow and blue as primaries — on it, the complement of red is green and the complement of blue is orange. The RGB (screen) wheel is the hue circle of digital color pickers, where the complement of red is cyan. Each rule comes with a one-line explanation of when it works well.

Common uses

• Finding the complementary or opposite color of a brand color.
• Learning and teaching color theory with Itten’s 12-hue artist’s wheel.
• Choosing paint, illustration or textile color schemes based on the traditional RYB wheel.
• Getting accent colors for a website or app that harmonize with a main color.

RYB or RGB: which wheel should I use?

Use the RYB wheel for traditional color theory, painting, illustration and design teaching: its hues are spaced the way artists name and mix them (red, red-orange, orange, yellow-orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, blue-violet, violet and red-violet at 30° steps). Use the RGB wheel when you want the hue circle of screen color pickers (HSV/HSB), for example to match a hue angle you see in a design app.

The same rule gives different colors on each wheel. Both are correct — they describe different color models — so pick the one your audience or medium expects.

The harmony rules

• Complementary: two opposite colors (180° apart) — the strongest contrast.
• Split-complementary: the base color and the two colors either side of its complement (150° and 210° at the default spread).
• Analogous: neighboring colors (±30° by default) — calm and cohesive.
• Triadic: three colors 120° apart.
• Tetradic (rectangle): two complementary pairs (0°, 60°, 180° and 240° by default).
• Square: four colors 90° apart.
• Monochromatic: one hue in lighter tints and darker shades.

The extra colors keep the base color’s saturation and brightness, so a pastel base gives pastel matches.

How the artist’s (RYB) wheel is calculated

Screens can only show RGB, so RYB colors have to be converted. This tool uses the paint-inspired RYB color cube of Gossett and Chen (2004): each corner of the cube (white, red, yellow, blue, orange, purple, green and black) has a chosen RGB value — blue, for example, is (0.163, 0.373, 0.6) — and colors in between are blended with the smoothed trilinear interpolation from the paper’s code. Hues around the wheel are 100% of one primary and up to 100% of a neighboring one, which reproduces Itten’s 12 hues.

Because the RYB wheel cannot show every screen color, a code you type is placed at the closest wheel position. Your color is kept exactly as the base, and the tool tells you when it is only approximately on the wheel.

Limitations

• Harmony rules are guidelines, not guarantees of a good result; lightness and the amount of each color matter as much as hue.
• The RYB wheel is an artistic model with no single standard conversion to RGB — another RYB tool may show slightly different colors for the same position.
• Very saturated screen colors (for example a bright cyan or electric blue) lie outside the RYB wheel and are approximated.
• Colors are sRGB; printed results depend on paper, ink and the printer’s color profile.

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