Color Wheel Masking Update

On the two last Color Sunday posts here and here, we’ve been looking at the concept of color wheel masking, the idea that we can map out a color scheme on top of a color wheel.

Blog reader David Briggs has made a brilliant contribution to this idea. He discovered a website called couleur.org by Philippe Colantoni that allows us to actually visualize a color scheme in three dimensions.

What you’re looking at here is a Dinotopia painting called “Palace in the Clouds” paired with a representation of the color scheme expressed in three dimensions.


The little floating blobs represent the amounts of each component color of the composition. On the left you see the hexagonal color wheel in pastel tones. Floating above that, white and blue blobs indicate the large areas of white and blue areas of the picture.

The diagram on the right shows the same diagram as viewed from the side. The vertical dimension indicates the value—or the level of lightness or darkness. The yellow and brown colors show up as little beads floating to the right of the red center line.


Here’s another painting with its color scheme chart. You’ll notice that most of the colors are fairly grayed down, which places them near the center of the axes. The light warm colors show up as a sprinkling of dots in the yellow-orange region at the upper right. The diagram on the right shows dark dots clustered at the bottom, greenish on the left of the red line, and brownish to the right.

My thanks to Mr. Colantoni and and Mr. Briggs for your generosity in sharing your discoveries. Don’t miss this coming Sunday, where we’ll continue our exploration of color wheel masking.

Tomorrow: Two Values