If you mix red, green, and blue light, you get white light. Mixing the colors generates new colors, as shown on the color wheel or circle on the right.

Green

green

Yellow

The Primary Colors of Light Mix all three together and black will result. But the primary colors of light are the secondary colors of pigment, which are red, green and violet. In other words, the secondary colors of pigment are the primary colors of light.

Light is color unto itself, and pigments take away colors from white light. Pigments work by absorbing certain wavelengths of light; they appear as the complementary color of the wavelength they absorb.

Pigments are colour particles that require a binding or dispersion agent to bind to the surface of the material to be coloured. Dyes have molecules that are smaller than pigment particles. Dyes are soluble in water and in certain types of solvents such as oil, alcohol, glycerine etc.

Additive colors Additive color mixing: adding red to green yields yellow; adding green to blue yields cyan; adding blue to red yields magenta; adding all three primary colors together yields white.

The secondary colors are cyan (a mixture of blue and green), magenta (a mixture of blue and red), and yellow (a mixture of green and red). Each secondary color is also the complementary color (or complement) of the primary color whose wavelength it does not contain.

Color Basics

• Three Primary Colors (Ps): Red, Yellow, Blue.
• Three Secondary Colors (S’): Orange, Green, Violet.
• Six Tertiary Colors (Ts): Red-Orange, Yellow-Orange, Yellow-Green, Blue-Green, Blue-Violet, Red-Violet, which are formed by mixing a primary with a secondary.

Accordingly, children should acquire the six primary colour terms (red, green, blue, yellow, black & white) before the five secondary colour terms (orange, pink, purple, brown & grey).

1 : a color produced by an equal mixture of a primary color with a secondary color adjacent to it on the color wheel. 2 : a color produced by mixing two secondary colors.

They are referred to as intermediary colors. Artists, as well as non-artists, refer to them as: blue-violet, blue-green, red-violet, red-orange, yellow-orange and yellow-green, as seen in this color wheel. They are not tertiary colors.

The sequence continues with quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, and denary, although most of these terms are rarely used. There’s no word relating to the number eleven but there is one that relates to the number twelve: duodenary.

There are three different types of colors. And the tertiary colors are yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green, and yellow-green. These are the 12 colors that typically appear on a color wheel.

Tertiary- and quaternary-color terms For the six RYB hues intermediate between the RYB primary and secondary colors, the names amber/marigold (yellow–orange), vermilion/cinnabar (red–orange), magenta (red–purple), violet (blue–purple), teal/aqua (blue-green), and chartreuse/lime green (yellow–green) are commonly found.

The tertiary colors are made by mixing equal parts of one primary color and one secondary color. There are six tertiary colors: yellow-orange, red-orange, red-violet, blue-violet, blue-green, and yellow-green. Although it is possible to mix your own secondary and tertiary colors, it is unnecessary and time-consuming.

There are 12 main colors on the color wheel. In the RGB color wheel, these hues are red, orange, yellow, chartreuse green, green, spring green, cyan, azure, blue, violet, magenta and rose.