2websites with description

* color wheel ! *

http://www.tigercolor.com/color-lab/color-theory/color-theory-intro.htm
http://colorschemedesigner.com/

Understanding of color theory is important in high school art level. I learned about the color wheel and basic color theory in Art 1 in my freshman year of high school too. If students understand about how color works, it makes much easier and effective to make a good painting and show their expression well. Often young artist gets frustrated with the outcome of their painting after spending several long hours of working. Tonality or mood overall painting can be totally changed from applying slightly wrong color. For example, if you used a little bit lighter red instead of vibrant pure red, your intention of pulling an impact of strong red in the painting could be potentially distorted. Moreover, the little mistake of one wrong color could distort the rest of the painting and overall mood. Of course high school children will think color is easy and they already know about it since kindergarten. But color theory is extended idea to understand the relationship of the colors to each other. Telling them the important purpose of knowing the relationship and how much they are useful should be introduced to children before the lesson. I like the tigercolor website because it has clearly indicated color wheel and it has four categories of important factors. They are divided into primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, warm/cool colors, tints, shades, tones, and color harmonies. For each subcategories, it includes a picture or more than a picture to assist understanding of the text. The second website has color palette generator that they can play with. They can try all of the color harmonies method taught from the first website on this color palette generator. This second website does not have much text as in the first website but it has key vocabularies of color harmonies: mono, complement, traid, tetrad, analogic, and accented analogic. Children can click on each one and the color generator will lead them to make a specific harmony of color using that specific method and they are easy to manipulate by simply clicking on colors they want.