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Joshua asks on YouTube: "You said in part 1 of Color Wheel Masking, "... As each of these colors approaches the center, it becomes a neutral gray." Why neutral gray, what is the reasoning or significance for this? I see in some wheels, the use of (outer to inner circles) white, black and saturation centers as well as neutral gray. Same question regarding a center white or black, if you please?"

A color circle created using CMYK Sliders (Source)

Answer: You could use white or black instead of gray at the center of a color wheel, and many people do, especially when they're in the digital realm. Whichever you choose, the center of the wheel should have zero hue saturation. Black, white, and gray all fit that description.

It helps to keep in mind that the color wheel doesn't represent the full color space, which is a three-dimensional volume, where the vertical axis is a gray scale. The Munsell color system charts color three dimensionally, like a tree with a trunk that goes from black at the bottom to white at the top, as the vertical arrays of hues branch out from the central trunk. Note that the colors have peak saturation at different values. Yellow peaks in lighter values and blue peaks at darker values.

So the color wheel is a horizontal cross section of that 3D color volume, sliced through the peak saturations of each hue, with a gray at the center.

Most color wheels don't have a constant value all around the perimeter. I chose to represent the hues at whatever value shows them at peak chroma, and then I put the center point at an average gray value rather than raising it up to white or dropping it to black.

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More on color in my book: Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter