The Real Primary Colors…

When you had art class as a kid, you probably already know the primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. Of course, these colors we all know are able to mix to have a secondary color which are purple, green, and orange. Now, what if I told you right now that those are not the real primary colors( dun dun duunnn). The real primary colors are yellow, magenta, and cyan. These are the colors in the Munsell color wheel. That is why they use printers use the CMYK because they don’t want their colors in the printing to be inaccurate . Let me show you an example…

As you can see, red is a secondary color. It does not belong into the primary colors. Have you ever wondered why you have such a muddy color when you mix the colors such as red and blue or blue and yellow? It’s probably because you have using the wrong colors. When you mix a secondary color with a primary color, the result would look really dark and muddy like this…

Take time to compare the first picture and the second picture. When mixing the blue and yellow, you can see that the green is very muddy looking and it is not very vibrant. Now see the green in the second picture and the one in the first picture. There is a drastic difference in that one color itself. Mixing the magenta and yellow in the first picture you get red, almost the same one in the second picture. Then mix cyan and magenta, the purple is very bright and probably the purple you would expect to come when you mix red and blue.

That is it for my first blog!!! Hope this blog is useful your next artwork whether you are oil painting, digital drawing, etc. We did not get into the the Munsell color wheel that deeply because it is mostly based on science. Here is the whole Munsell and Triadic color wheel if you want to see the more of the colors in the wheel…