Hex to Color Wheel Conversion

I agree Robert re the colour wheel and its uses.  On the subject of book recommendations, by far the most useful one that I've come across  is 'Colour: a workshop for artists and designers' by David Hornung (go for the 2nd edition or beyond). It doesn't focus overmuch on colour mixing (though that is covered) but has lots of material on colour harmony and interaction. Its also very practical, defining a 15 week course of tasks.

I've never used a colour wheel, I mix colours until I come up with what I want.

Denise, You're not missing anything by not using a colour-wheel.  I suppose the drawback to your method is that you could waste a lot of paint and mix a lot of mud, but I think you really need to be pretty clueless about colour to do that, which of course you're not.   There's plenty of guidance, in all sorts of places, if needed - you can go for a warm or cool version of each primary (if you can recognize the difference: I read a US painter telling us that Pthalo Blue was a warm blue - er, yes.... like ice is quite hot...  Even granted that "warm" and "cool" attributes of colour are theoretical, and to some extent subjective, the idea that Pthalo is warm by comparison with Ultramarine, which was the bat-wit comparison she made, did make me wonder how she ever managed to paint at all). Basically, if you have an orange-leaning red, and a blue-leaning red (eg, Cadmium, then Alizarin or Rose), an orange inclining yellow, and a greenish one (Cad Yellow, Lemon Yellow), a purple-inclining blue and a green-leaning blue (big choice for the latter, there's only one purplish-blue, which is Ultramarine, but you could run the gamut from Pthalo Blue, to Prussian, Cerulean/Coeruleum, with Cobalt sort of neither one nor the other, and add the earth colours - umbers, siennas, ochres, you could describe those as warm or cool, or as having defined colour biases, or in several other ways, but - you'd have a basically sound palette; and basic knowledge of the complementaries which is easy (but which I sometimes have to stop and think about, I admit) should give you the rest and stop mud-mixing.   The colour wheel just complicates things unnecessarily. I shall have to stop reading this thread, because there's now two books I'll have to look out for.  I expect mine - have I ever mentioned mine?  No?  Amazon Kindle Store, Oil Paint Basics, absolute snip, just the thing you want for Christmas, rave reviews (I know, I wrote them...) - is just as good if not miles better.  I was going to revise it, but I've sort of revised my proposed revisions to come back where I started from - e.g. while you can do without paint thinners/solvents, I'm not at all sure I really want to keep doing so.  Still - you don't need solvents, they just make a few things a little easier.  Whether that's worth the adverse health complications is something else again, but, for the 100th time this year, I digress.  I would say it's my age, but you don't catch Sylvia doing this - her mind is kept in top gear by Sam the dog, and now by her hens: AND I bet she hasn't got a spectrometer. 

Neither have I… nor have I ever needed one, and I’m not overly excited by colour wheels if I’m honest. Theory is fine but practical application is always the way to go in my opinion - get a small selection of paints squeezed out on your palette and learn how to mix! It takes time but it’s great fun experimenting and exploring colour! Select a tried and tested palette such as say the colours Edward Seago used for instance, or Caravaggio, it doesn’t matter. That’s how I learned about colour, we never went near a colour wheel at college!

When I started paint in I bought one never worked out how to use it and binned it , I honestly can’t see the use for them . 

Just to add, I do believe that it’s important to have a basic understanding of the colour wheel, certainly the primary and secondary colours. It also helps to understand the warm and cool colours and how to use them within a painting.  It can help the artist to understand the use and importance of complimentary colours, and also their respective tonal values on the 0 to 10 tonal scale! A tonal scale can come in very useful here. This is the one that I have, but there are some different types!

Discombobulated and flummoxed by all of these technicalities....sorry.  I paint a pic ,I have my colours in front of me and I just paint.

Yes, but you choose those colours first - you don't just buy a job lot of colours and use the lot: we can all see you don't do that....   We've moved quite a way from the original post - which wasn't about the colour-wheel.  Sorry about that, as I helped to derail it!   And I'm about to continue doing so - little tinker.....   There are wheels, and wheels - the more complex the wheel got, the less useful it became; the useful ones are those that come with a bit of explanation as to their purpose.  If you find one which offers you the primaries and secondaries set against their complementaries on the other side of the wheel, that's useful - if you realize that's what they're doing: they need to come with a bit of explanation.  To reduce this to the veriest basics, you'll have red balanced by green, blue by yellow - and you should be told that a whole range of greys can be made - coloured greys, which are so useful - from mixes of those complementaries; as can chromatic blacks.  That's a useful wheel - even though experienced painters will long since have absorbed that knowledge and won't need the wheel to remind them. Immensely complicated wheels, showing "tertiaries", can be works of art in themselves - put one on your wall!  But useless in practical terms - all they do is show you lots of colours; but never, you'll notice, that particular colour you happen to need right now: you get that, if it's possible to get it - and it's useful to remember that some things are beyond us - by knowledge of the properties of the pigments you use, and more broadly knowledge of the basic principles of colour-mixing.  Experience should derive from these - because it'll take a lifetime to acquire that experience if one starts from a basis of total ignorance: it can be done; some people (not I!) seem to have such an understanding built in to their genetic make-up; but not having that sort of time ahead of me, I learned all I could about colour, without being led up the garden path by the many versions of the colour-wheel.  When I found the Michael Wilcox School of Colour, I was pleased to discover a scientific basis for what I think I'd learned already,  by trial, error, and a LOT of reading.   Now then - he bored on - now then: I don't think the Wilcox method infallible - I certainly don't always use it; if I did, I might have some trouble incorporating colours not identified by Wilcox as being sufficient; not the point though - it's an excellent teaching method.  Few of us if any on this thread are inexperenced painters, but if I were recommending one single course on colour-mixing to those starting out, this is the one I'd suggest - because it may have its inadequacies as one ventures further forward, but it's a way  to learn how to mix tens of thousands of hues from a limited range of 12 colours, including white.  That's got to be worth knowing - yes you can get there by other routes, but if you don't have to, why would you?   There is of course much more to painting than just colour-mixing: I think it's important to add that, given where this thread began - you could be (note, I didn't say I could be) the most proficient mixer of colour in the known universe, and still be a pig-awful painter (again, not me!  But not a description of any painter on this thread, and probably not true of the entire assembly of Painters Online - I don't want to go making enemies at my time of life...). 

Alan, many thanks for alerting us to Hazel Soan's colour book, a copy is winging its way to me as I write. As is Paul Bailey's Experimental nature in acrylics, semi-abstract landscape is something I'd like to be able to do but haven't known where to start, this sounds as if it will be helpful. If it works out you might even see some on the Gallery!