Colours and mixing
Art & Design · Early Years · The School
The three you cannot mix
Red, yellow and blue are PRIMARY colours in paint. You cannot make them by mixing anything else. But everything else on your page can be built from them.
Making the secondaries
Red and yellow make orange. Yellow and blue make green. Blue and red make purple. Mix each one yourself. Paint a small square of it. Those three are the SECONDARY colours. Mixing them is more useful than owning a big paint box.
Lighter and darker
Add white to make a colour lighter. That is a TINT. Add a little black to make it darker. That is a SHADE. Add the white slowly. White is powerful and it swallows colour fast. Add the black even more slowly.
Mix red and yellow. You get orange. Now mix in a bit MORE yellow. You get a lighter, brighter orange. Now add more red instead. You get a deep, hot orange. That is three oranges from two colours. None of them came out of a tube. Paint the three side by side and label them. Now try the same with blue and yellow. You will find at least four greens hiding in there.
Why your mixes turn brown
Mix all three primaries together and you get brown or grey. That is not a failure. It is just what happens when every colour is in the pot at once. It explains the muddy puddle at the end of a painting session. The brush carried a little of everything back into the water each time. So rinse your brush between colours. And mix on a plate, not in the pot. And when you actually WANT brown, for tree bark or for soil, you now know how to make it on purpose.