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| tool fanned out; back of golden yellow; front of yellow |
This has long been my go-to color tool for several reasons.
- It is based on the printer's primaries of cyan, magenta, and yellow (CMYK).
- It uses a 24-color wheel.
- Each card shows complementary, analogous, two versions of split-complementary, and triadic.
The tool has 6 cards at the beginning to provide an overview of color theory
and how to use the tool. There's a color wheel with all 24 colors numbered,
beginning with yellow as #1 and working through greens to blues, through
purples to reds, and ending with oranges. It also has two transparent cards at
the back in red and green to help when evaluating value. The cards are tall
glossy stock clipped together at one corner. You can easily fan out the whole
tool, or just the colors you are currently evaluating. Since everything is
clipped together, you are unlikely to misplace a card. The whole thing stores
in a clear plastic pouch that snaps closed.
Each color card has the pure color in a header at the top and a number in the upper right to help you orient that color on the color wheel. Down the left side are samples of 16 versions of the hue, include the pure color, 11 tints and shades, and 4 tones. The pure hue is marked on every card, making it possible to evaluate the light value. For example, you can see the pure hue of color 15 purple is much farther down the card than the pure hue of color 2 chartreuse. The back of each card has even more samples. There are 18 samples of the pure hue with its tints and shades plus 16 tones. All the colors on the back have CMYK, RGB, and Hex formulas, allowing you more easily to match and specify colors.
There's a reason this tool is still available a decade and a half later. With 34 versions of each of 24 colors, it gives you 816 colors in your pocket! The 24-color wheel means you have the ⅓, ½, and ⅔ steps between each primary and secondary color.
The tool has a few downsides. While you can unscrew the clip, it isn't designed for you to do that easily. When choosing colors by fanning the cards, you can find yourself picking colors of similar values, since you can't easily line up different values for comparison. Each color swatch is about ⅝-inch tall — less than 1 centimeter. That's small. There's no easy way to manipulate choices to compare proportion. In spite of the colored films for evaluating value, there's no card with a gray scale printed on it.
Despite these drawbacks, I like this tool a lot. The full color wheel and the
CMYK base are enough to recommend it. If you are spinning or weaving, you are
working with optical mixing. The printer's CMYK wheel is the one you need.
This tool can help you evaluate based on that color theory.
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