There are three main ways to combine colors using a color wheel: complementary, analogous, and triadic. The colors always blend from one to the next, like a spectrum, except in a circle. There’s lots of different kinds and styles, but the basics of the colors on them are always the same. The color wheel is a color mixing guide that helps to understand how colors work together. We’ve mentioned the color wheel as we talked about these types of colors, but let’s take a moment to better understand it. You might even be curious to know what color is indigo! Understanding the color wheel So yellow orange is found between yellow and orange, while blue violet sits between blue and violet.Īdmittedly there’s a lot of confusion in the nomenclature of purple vs. These are the type of colors seen in nature, where the very brightest shades are less common.Įach sits between the primary and secondary color on the wheel. These are sometimes known as fractional colors because they aren’t as pure as primary or secondary. Tertiary colors are created by mixing two colors on a color wheel, one primary and one secondary. You mix red and blue to get violet, red and yellow to get orange, and blue and yellow to get green.

There are three main ones: orange, violet (or purple), and green. Secondary colors are colors that you obtain by mixing two of the primary colors together.

We’ll discuss black and white more later when we talk about shades, tints, and tones. In the RYB system, white is a bit more challenging. While black is made by mixing all three primary colors together, white is the absence of color. In our traditional color wheel (RYB), that’s red, yellow, and blue These three colors are then used to mix virtually every other color. Top of the list are the primary colors: the three colors that cannot be mixed from other colors. You can see in the simple illustration below that the absence of RGB color is black, and the sum of it is white – or white light. The RGB system, which we won’t delve into here, is an additive system, which means colors get lighter as you add more color – since they are made of light! Makes sense, right? This is also true of CMYK ink colors used by printers. The RYB color model is subtractive, which means colors get darker as you add more colors or blend them together.

Those could be acrylic paints, oil paints, house paint colors, hair or fabric dyes, etc.īut it’s not about the RGB color model that’s based on light. This article is about the RYB color wheel used by artists and designers working with paint colors, pigments, or dyes. Let’s get to know the color mixing chart, and see what a powerful tool it can be!įirst let’s clarify. This can be useful for business colors, interior color schemes, or for hobbies like painting and dyeing. I love seeing all the colors in neat order, like a rainbow.īut do you know how you can use a color chart to get the specific colors you want?

Primary and secondary color wheel