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. Everything else on your page can be built from them.
Making the secondaries
Red + yellow = orange. Yellow + blue = green. Blue + red = purple. Mix each one yourself and paint a small square of it. Those three are the SECONDARY colours, and 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 — a SHADE. Add white slowly; white is powerful and swallows colour fast. Add black even more slowly.
Mix red and yellow: orange. Now mix a bit MORE yellow: a lighter, brighter orange. Now more red: a deep, hot orange. Three oranges from two colours, and none of them came out of a tube. Paint the three side by side and label them, then 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 simply what happens when every colour is in the pot at once, and 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 the brush between colours, and mix on a plate rather than in the pot. And when you actually WANT brown, for tree bark or soil, you now know how to make it on purpose instead of by accident.