Secondary color
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A secondary color is a color made by mixing two primary colors in a given color space. Examples include the following.
| red | (●) | + | green | (●) | = | yellow | (●) | ||
| red | (●) | + | blue | (●) | = | magenta | (●) | ||
| green | (●) | + | blue | (●) | = | cyan | (●) | ||
| cyan | (●) | + | magenta | (●) | = | blue | (●) | ||
| cyan | (●) | + | yellow | (●) | = | green | (●) | ||
| magenta | (●) | + | yellow | (●) | = | red | (●) | ||
Traditional
| blue | (●) | + | yellow | (●) | = | green | (●) | ||
| blue | (●) | + | red | (●) | = | purple | (●) | ||
| yellow | (●) | + | red | (●) | = | orange | (●) | ||
In principle the theory for pigments should hold for paints as well. However the first paints were mixed long before modern color science, and the pigments available to early painters were limited. In particular natural cyan and magenta pigments were hard to come by, and therefore blue and red hues were used respectively. Thus to this day it is widely taught that red, yellow and blue are the primary colors and that orange, green and purple the secondary colors. In reality it is impossible to obtain a saturated green by mixing blue and yellow or a saturated purple by mixing blue and red. This practical problem is often solved by calling pink "red" and light blue "blue".
See also
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