Primary Colors,Secondary Colors and Tertiary Colors

Primary Colors

Primary colors include red, blue and yellow are at the top of any color structure. Primary colors cannot be mixed from other colors. They are the source of all other colors. That's because you can think of the three Primaries as the original parents of all the future generations of colors.

Secondary Colors

Secondary colors are mixed from two primary colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel.

Think of the Secondary colors as the children of the three primaries Orange, Purple and Green

​The Secondary colors are mixed like this:

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• Yellow  +  Red  =       ORANGE
• Red       +  Blue  =      PURPLE
• Blue      +  Yellow  =  GREEN

Tertiary Colors

Finally the remaining six colors are referred to as the Tertiary Colors. Think of these as the six grandchildren of the Primary Colors.

Again, Color Theory teaches us that each Tertiary color is the result of one Primary Color mixed with one of its nearest Secondary colors. Therefore we end up with a new color somewhere in between.

• Yellow  +  Orange  =  YELLOW/ORANGE
• Red  +  Orange  =       RED/ORANGE
• Red  +  Purple  =        RED/PURPLE
• Blue  +  Purple  =       BLUE/PURPLE
• Blue  +  Green  =        BLUE/GREEN
• Yellow  +  Green  =    YELLOW/GREEN