Interactive Color Wheel
Pick or spin to any color and see its matches right on the wheel — the complementary color opposite, analogous neighbours and triadic points — each as a real paint. Below: how the color wheel works, from primary and secondary colors to the full 12-color wheel.
On the colour wheel, complementary colours sit opposite, analogous colours sit side by side and triadic colours form a triangle. Pick any colour below to see all its matches as real paint.
Tap a swatch to copy its hex; each shows the nearest real paint. Want full schemes in buyable paint? Open the combination generator.
A standard color wheel has 12 colors built from three groups. Primary colors — red, yellow and blue — can't be mixed from others. Secondary colors — orange, green and purple — are each a mix of two primaries. Tertiary colors are the six in between (like red-orange and blue-green), made by mixing a primary with a neighbouring secondary. Together they form the 12-color wheel below.
Tap any to copy its hex.
Opposite (complementary) colors
Colors directly opposite on the wheel are complementary — red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple. They create the strongest contrast and make each other look more vivid, which is why they're used for accents and call-to-action moments. Pick any color above to see its opposite marked on the wheel.
Analogous, triadic & split
Analogous colors sit next to each other and feel calm and cohesive. Triadic colors are three evenly spaced points — balanced and lively. Split-complementary takes a color plus the two beside its opposite — high contrast but easier to balance than a straight complement.
Warm vs cool
One half of the wheel is warm (reds, oranges, yellows) and feels energetic and cozy; the other is cool (greens, blues, purples) and feels calm and spacious. Keeping a scheme mostly warm or mostly cool reads as intentional.
Using the wheel in art & design
Painters, designers and decorators use the wheel to plan palettes before committing. Once you've found a relationship you like here, take it into the combination generator to build a full scheme in real, buyable paints, or browse the color chart.
RGB vs RYB color wheel
There are two common wheels. The traditional RYB wheel (red-yellow-blue) is what artists and decorators learn — it's the one above. The RGB wheel (red-green-blue) is additive and describes light on screens, where red, green and blue combine to make white. Paint mixing follows RYB; pixels follow RGB. This picker uses screen color (RGB/HSL) but the harmony relationships hold on both.
Contrast on the wheel
The further apart two colors sit on the wheel, the higher their contrast — opposite (complementary) colors give the maximum. High contrast grabs attention (great for accents); low-contrast analogous schemes feel calm. For text legibility, contrast also depends on lightness — check it in the generator, which shows WCAG contrast for every pair.
Our color tools run on our own catalogue of 26,000+ real paint colors across 16 brands — Benjamin Moore, Sherwin-Williams, Behr, Dulux, RAL and more — with the color math (HSL and CIELAB matching) computed in-house, not scraped from summaries. Every color you pick maps to a real, buyable paint with its code, so what you see here you can actually take to the store. We review and update these tools and their data regularly.
Created by Denis Kataev, founder of DSGN.HOUSE — a software engineer and digital entrepreneur building professional color-design tools for everyone.
What colors are on the color wheel?+
A standard color wheel has 12 colors: three primary (red, yellow, blue), three secondary (orange, green, purple) and six tertiary colors mixed in between. See them all in the 12-color wheel above.
What are opposite colors on the color wheel?+
Opposite (complementary) colors sit directly across from each other — like red and green, or blue and orange. They give the highest contrast. Pick any color on the wheel to see its opposite marked.
How do I use a color wheel?+
Pick a base color, then choose a harmony — complementary for contrast, analogous for calm, triadic for balance. The wheel marks the matching colors; tap a swatch to copy it or build a full palette in real paint.
What's the difference between primary, secondary and tertiary colors?+
Primary colors (red, yellow, blue) can't be mixed from others. Secondary colors (orange, green, purple) are mixes of two primaries. Tertiary colors are mixes of a primary and a neighbouring secondary.