How to create a Color Wheel

Hi, I’m Kelly from DesignertoFullStack.com and you

may be watching this video because you want to create a pie

slice scientific color wheel, which I’m going to show you how to do or

maybe you’ve just finished making the HSB pie slice

color wheel and you’d like to actually put in scientific colors. So,

I’m going to start by how you can use Adobe

Illustrator to find your scientific colors.

So you’re going to go to Window > Swatches. I

have mine checked, so here’s my swatches.

In swatches, there’s a fly out panel and you’re going to look for Open

Swatch Library and you’re going to come into Scientific.

So Adobe already has given you a color palette that’s

going to be helpful for this. So you can do Analogous, I guess.

And it will pop up a panel.

And these are the 12 analogous scientific color

groupings. So analogous means the three,

pie slices next to each other.

So this first line is the 12

that we’re going to use in our color wheel.

So using the white select arrow or your live paint,

you can now check it. Change the colors.

So I have my red and I’m going to use this

red.

Next, I just keep going around as

I change my colors. Oh,

and what I’ve done and you need to pay attention to you is that

you’re on your Fill and not your Stroke.

So I’m going to come back and try again here.

There we go.

And if it has a stroke, you can just delete it back out.

So we’ll come to here. I don’t need that as a stroke.

And I’m deleting it by

just saying None for stroke. Okay.

So remember, we change the colors by which of these boxes is on top,

whether it’s the fill, which is a solid square,

or a stroke, which is the outline.

Alright, so I’m slowly going around changing my colors to

the Adobe Scientific Color Palette.

Alright. And now these are true,

colors that could work for your color wheel.

So, we now could

see with these colors that we have the red,

blue, yellow as your primary colors.

And also,

complementary colors are now in the right order as well.

Alright, so this is what we have.

Remember you can always select your circle,

and then from the corner, you could .. maybe we’ll,

Rotate. So, if you want to rotate,

so maybe red is right at the top.

You could do that, so red, yellow, blue still forms your triangle.

Alright. So, let’s start from the beginning.

If you want to be able to make a pie,

with these twelve slices like this,

you’ll start by using your artboard tool.

And we’re going to make it a square. So,

I’m holding down SHIFT with my keyboard.

And remember, I let go of my mouse or wand before my keyboard.

Next, I’m going to grab my circle tool.

And if I click once, it will bring up a pop-up where I

can put a size. So, I’m going to say 9-inch.

We want it to be a circle, so it needs to be the same

size by 9-inch. Alright,

and I’m going to click the default fill and stroke so that it makes it

white inside and a black stroke so that I can see it.

And we are going to use the Align tool.

So, I’m going to open up Window < Align so you can see it a

little bit better. In Window < Align,

we have multiple options. Important here,

we’re going to Align to, and you want to make sure it’s aligned to

the artboard. So, our goal is to center the line.

So, now to center, I need to center vertically and horizontally.

So, I’m going to do vertical and horizontal.

Okay, vertical align center and this one was horizontal.

Alright, now it’s in the center. Next,

we’re going to work with the line. So,

we’re going to use the LINE tool. And to make a straight line,

I’m going to hold down Shift on my keyboard. Okay,

I’ll let go of it. . My mouse before my keyboard.

Alright, now I can go back to my black arrow,

my selection arrow. Click and drag to get both the circle and

the line. And we’re still aligning to artboard.

And we’re going to do the horizontal align center and the vertical align center

again. Alright,

Now we’re going to click off of everything and just grab the line.

So, for the line, we’re going to go back Okay.

Object, transform, rotate.

Okay, so in rotate, I have preview checked,

which means I can see what,

the degrees that I put in my rotate angle are going to look

like. So we are going to rotate 30 degrees and

that’s how we’re going to make the pie slices.

So instead of okay, I’m going to say copy.

And what this does is now I have two lines.

Now, I can go object,

transform again, which is also command D and it

will rotate that second line another 30 degrees.

Alright, so now you can see we’re starting to fill that circle with

pie slices. So you can say transform again or command

D on your keyboard.

Alright, once you have it filled and you have 12 pie slices.

This is, Next, we’re going to use our selection

arrow, click and drag so that we have all the lines selected

and the circle.

Next, we’re going to use pathfinder. So window > pathfinder and

we’re going to say divide. And what that does is it’s going to remove

the parts of the line that are outside of the circle.

Alright, so now we have just the shape.

So, we’re going to use our tool called

Live paint bucket. When I select that

tool and go over this shape that is already selected,

I haven’t let go of it. It still has the blue outline on it.

I get the option click to make a live paint group.

If you’ve missed that and it’s not selected,

you need to go back, click and drag to make it selected again.

And then go to your live paint. You’re going to click on click once

and now what that does is every pie size is able to be filled.

So at this point what I can do is I’ll turn off my stroke.

I’ll go to my fill and I can start with my colors.

I
go to my orange. It’s actually red orange.

I’ll go to yellow orange. Okay, so you’re gonna make your way all the

way around in this same manner.

Okay. If you’d like to add a black

background, you can use the rectangle tool.

Click once.

you can make the size of your artboard.

So we can see the size of our artboard by clicking on artboard.

And now it’s selected. And up here I can see it’s 10.5,

4, 3, 3. Let’s just make- that an easy,

10.5, and 10.5.

Okay. Now I’m going to go back to my rectangle tool.

Click once, and I can say 10.5 IN for inch.

10.5 IN for inch.

Okay. With it selected, I can come double click where the

solid fill is. Drag all the way to the bottom.

Black is all zeros for the hex code.

. All right. Now we can use our line tools.

So we’re centering, centering again to the artboard,

and then important object arrange, send it back.

We’ll bring it to the back. Again,

you can always grab your entire color wheel

and rotate. So if you would like to have red centered at

the top, so your primary colors are red,

yellow, blue, or if you want to start with yellow at the top,

you can rotate and go from there. But this gives you all of the

scientific, complementary colors,

primary colors, secondary colors, all organized and across from each other

in the correct way. All right.

So I hope this helps you.

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