I was interested in trying to map out color wheels to the music (chromatic scale / wheel of fifths) so that I could see a visual representation of the relationships between various chords/scales, etc. however first I needed to determine a color wheel to work from.
I ended up spending a day or two making different 'base' color wheels instead; couldn't settle on one.
First I started w/ an approximate additive color wheel. I made some edits to this based on the v. in the new template.
Decided I'd want a template that allows me to compare the 'vibration' between adjacent colors & commentaries.
An approximate additive color wheel in the new template. I came back to this one again after learning a bit more about color selection in Illustrator.
At first I tried to make this wheel based on named html values with some adjustments afterward. Subsequently found Deke McClellands Visible Spectrum Wheel: http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/color_cast/visible_color_spectrum.html where he explains that the Hue Values in PS/AI are divided evenly in 30° increments. Since this wheel was already pretty close to that, I went ahead and entered in values at said increments with maximum saturation.
Trying to use named HTML colors to approximate something like the additive wheel.
Starting with the 30° & then trying to adjust values appropriately. Gives that nice Purple / Lime Green complement; which you get from a Netwonian color wheel (honestly that's the wheel that I want to make/see but I'm not sure the best way to go about mapping that precisely.
Hoping to color some wheel's by hand I wanted to see what Copic Markers to use, so I colored based on the downloadable swatches (from the 0's range). Unfortunately the official hue categories for those don't include Yellow-Orange or Red-Orange, and Green/Yellow-Green look a bit redundant.
With so many holes in the last one, tried to fill in the gabs or select appropriate color for an additive wheel.
Here's an approximation with Copic swatches based on the 30° AI/PS wheel.
I felt the Yellow/Orange gap in the previous was too strong so I added Yellow-Orange back in & removed one of the redundant Red-Violets. Not to practical for Copic drawing as the colors selected don't necessarily correspond to an array of values at the given hue/saturation.
After adding Yellow-Orange back in to the Copic Swatch v. I wanted to do the same with the 30° v.
Went back to the original Subtractive wheel & cut out Blue-Purple to make more room for a transition between Blue & Green.
I was passively thinking about the circle of 5ths as I was working on these, and so noticed that it would just be a series of alternating split complements. Another thing I was interested in was the inversion of sharps and flats across the wheel of fiths, although upon consideration, the relevant aspect of that would really be the diatonic scale that would be produced, which I haven't gotten to yet.
Another hiccup I ran into is where to start. The audible spectrum 'loops' enough for us to hear the same notes at different octaves (so C seems arbitrary to me at the moment), but the visible spectrum doesn't; so I don't see any good organizing principle to abide by in order to choose which color goes with which note.
