In case you missed it, part 1 of this post is here - it has the first few steps for getting started on a personal color wheel.
Add color to your wheel
Finally, the fun part! Use your color diary pages as references for adding color to your wheel.
There’s so many ways to approach the color-emotion differentiation.
You may decide to represent weaker and stronger versions of an emotion with muted and saturated varieties of a color. I did that with my “rage” section. The strongest emotion - rage - felt like a really saturated red to me. But angry, mad, and annoyed felt weaker and so I assigned them different muted reds.
Perhaps you’ll feel that as the emotion changes in strength, the colors change in hue. For me, I feel confidence is a pink-red-violet. As the associated emotions change from confidence to bold to grounded to optimistic, I feel the hue gets bluer.
I used my color diary data to create two types of color wheels, both created with watercolor.1 Each wheel has features that I love. This six petal wheel keeps it simple - I needed only focus on 24 emotions. And the space between the petals let me play with letting the colors from one “petal of emotions” merge and blend with the adjacent petal’s colors.
Since the two-tiered wheel included 4 variations of each major emotion, I enjoyed doing some improvising of emotions and colors that weren’t included in my diary. I think the color assignments are more nuanced on this wheel, with more variety in the saturations and values of the hues.
I’d love to see more personal color wheels. Please do share yours, either in the comments here or over in the every. day. color chat.
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I was able to paint on 140 lb. hot pressed watercolor paper by trimming the sheets to 8.5” x 11” and running them through my laser printer.