Color Fidget
The Color Fidget: A Next-Level Harmony Guide
HereThe Gray Muse is the exclusive original creator and seller of The Color Fidget©—a next-level interactive color wheel design created by educator Peter Donahue. It's a take-anywhere guide, its primary purpose for exploring and selecting harmonic color combinations. The design, by color theory educator Peter Donahue, is based on the idea that there’s so much more to harmony than complements, triads, and red-yellow-blue!
But how can you use the Color Fidget to create color harmonies?
Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned artist or designer, choosing colors can be difficult. To show what you can do with the Color Fidget, Peter has created FREE video courses on the basics of color and choosing colors below. Explore all 6 videos below now.
*Note: The Color Fidget is designed primarily as a visual learning tool. While it spins, the movement is not guaranteed to be smooth or continuous. The function is secondary to the educational value it provides.
Lesson 1: Beyond the Traditional Color Wheel
Most traditional color wheels for artists and designers rely on outdated color mixing theory (The idea that red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors) and show a total of 12 hues. In this lesson, you’ll learn why the Color Fidget dispenses with primary colors and includes 20 hues defined by perceptual steps.
VIDEO LESSON ONE:
Lesson 2: Color Character and Emotion
In this lesson, we’ll define character, learn about different color characters, how they relate to each other, and the emotional meanings, or moods, they can communicate. The Color Fidget includes three characters of each of its hues: vivid, muted, and grayish. But this lesson will explain how knowledge of the full range of characters and how they relate can help you get the most out of the Color Fidget.
Video Lesson 2:
Lesson 3: Creating Palettes with Gamut Masking
Painters like James Gurney and Richard Robinson have popularized the use of gamut masks to help artists visualize careful adjustments to their palettes. The vividness, mood, or even temperature (warm/cool) of a painting can be planned with a gamut mask. Triangles and rectangles of various proportions and sizes are popular ways to structure gamut masks. But any shape that obscures some colors while revealing others can be useful as a way to limit the color options available to you. In this lesson, we’ll look at how to use the Color Fidget to explore limited gamuts.
Video Lesson 3
Lesson 4: Choosing Colors for Contrast and Similarity
In this lesson, we’ll discover Moon-Spencer harmony theory, a way of assigning meaningful relationships to the colors in a scheme. We’ll define Moon and Spencer’s four color relationships — identity, similarity, contrast, and ambiguity — what they communicate, and how to identify them on the Color Fidget.
Video Lesson 4:
Lesson 5: Colors Must Play Roles
In this lesson, we’ll discuss how color can best communicate when each color in a scheme or palette plays a distinct role. And we’ll look at a couple examples of how to define colors roles on the Color Fidget.
Putting color in different roles means each color is used in a different amount. We’ll look at something called the 60-30-10 rule and apply it to a few examples, and discuss a few counter-examples. The main takeaway is to be intentional, because if you’re not — no combination of colors is going to automatically look good, no matter how carefully you choose them.
Video Lesson 5:
Lesson 6: Applying the Color Fidget to Real Projects
This lesson will demonstrate two real examples of using the Color Fidget to brainstorm color combinations. First, follow along as Peter creates an acrylic painting, modifying the colors from a reference photo with input from the Color Fidget. Then, follow as he tweaks the brand colors on a mood board for a fictional baking brand.
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For more color lessons and resources, please check out Peter Donahue's links here.
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Please note: All educational resources provided on this page, including videos, diagrams, and written content, are the intellectual property of Peter Donahue and may not be copied, reproduced, or distributed without his explicit consent.
The Color Fidget © is an original copyrighted design, available exclusively through The Gray Muse. Any similar products found online using our images or descriptions are unauthorized reproductions. We are not affiliated with these sellers and cannot provide support for purchases made elsewhere.
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