Color mixing chart

The grid at the top mixes each primary with each other one, a part of each. Red and yellow make orange, yellow and blue make green, and red and blue make purple. Those three are the secondary colours, and the grid is the same across the diagonal because the order you mix in doesn't matter.

The tertiary colours sit between a primary and the secondary next to it on the colour wheel. Mix the two in equal parts: red and orange make red-orange, blue and green make blue-green. In primaries that is 3 parts to 1, so red-orange is 3 red to 1 yellow.

Tints and shades run from light to dark across each row. A tint is a colour mixed with white and a shade is a colour mixed with black (tints and shades). The white columns are 1 part paint to 3, 2 and 1 parts white; the black columns are 8, 4 and 2 parts paint to 1 part black, because a little black goes a long way.

Tick Leave the mixes blank and every mixed square prints as an empty dashed box, with only the paints you start from filled in. It's the usual exercise for a first colour lesson: mix each square, paint it in, and compare with the printed key afterwards.

Print in colour, with background graphics on if your browser asks. Printers can't match paint any more than screens can, so the squares are a guide to the hue, not a colour standard.

This chart uses the painter's primaries, red, yellow and blue. The idea is old: Moses Harris drew an 18-colour wheel on it in 1766, and it ran through the colour teaching of the Bauhaus (RYB colour model). It is still how most people learn to mix paint.

It isn't how printers work. Inks use cyan, magenta and yellow, which reach brighter greens and purples, and the same article calls CMY much more accurate in gamut and intensity than red, yellow and blue. Modern pigments such as the phthalocyanine blues and quinacridone reds come closer to those ideal ink colours, by the same account. For screen colours, hex to CMYK shows the ink split and hex to HSL the hue.

Opposite each primary on the wheel is the secondary made from the other two: red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange (complementary colours). Mixed together they dull each other towards brown and grey, because between them they hold all three primaries.

What colours make brown has the recipes in parts, from tan to a near-black brown, and a printable sheet of them.

Every square on this page comes from the same model of paint, by Nathan Gossett and Baoquan Chen (InfoVis 2004): red, yellow and blue as the corners of a cube, a screen colour picked for each corner, and a blend between them. Parts set the point in the cube by their ratio, white moves it towards the white corner, and black darkens the result. A screen can only approximate paint, so treat the hex codes as a guide.