Colour Wheels
Introduction
Instructions
1) Click on the relevant button to start the download of each file, selecting the ‘Save’ option, rather than ‘Open’. Navigate to where the file is to be stored and click ‘Save’, leaving the default name.
2) Start up PagePlus; navigate to the downloaded file and open it (how the file has been created can be seen in the layers tab).
3) Toggle the ‘Edit All Layers’ button to on.
4) With the ‘Pointer tool selected, drag across the entire colour wheel to select all layers.
5) Drag the colour wheel across and into the ‘My Designs’ section of the ‘Gallery’ tab. This will create a copy of the wheel that is always available from now on.
6) Give the design a name in the pop-up window (I suggest using the format ‘HSL Tint Colour Wheel’). We will be able to see that it is a colour wheel, putting HSL or CMYK first followed by Tint or Shade will help to differentiate even if the words ‘Colour Wheel’ are obscured.
7) Close the file but do not save.
Now, whenever we want to use them to make up a particular colour scheme, it's quite simply a case of dragging either the CMYK or HSL versions onto the pasteboard; selecting the colour picker on the colour tab, dragging it to the relevant colour and setting our swatch.
Each shade or tint change is a 20% difference in opacity, if you wanted a finer gradient, keep the original file safe and adjust the transparency of the shade or tint layer accordingly.
Remember, experiment, and… have FUN!
The files on this page are freely available for downloading.
Having followed the excellent PagePlus Design Labs ‘Working with Colour Schemes’ tutorial, I was a bit disappointed there is no colour wheel tucked away somewhere in the program. To rectify this, I have come up with four in PagePlus X2 format. “Four?” I hear someone ask. Yes, there are two CMYK versions and two in HSL; splitting both the CMYK and HSL into ‘Shades’ (black added) and ‘Tints (white added) it should be easier to create visually correct and workable colour schemes. Colour wheels help to define relationships between colours.
As they are in PagePlus X2 format, they will not open in earlier versions. A purely RGB workaround for this available here in the WebPlus tutorials.
The colours have been created ‘by-the-numbers’, so should work with a professional print bureaux but I cannot guarantee this, I recommend checking first.
CMYK Tint Colour Wheel
HSL Shade Colour Wheel
HSL Tint Colour Wheel
