color wheel primary and secondary colors

These six are: Vermilion (orange combined with red), magenta (red combined with purple), violet (purple combined with blue), teal (blue combined with green), chartreuse (green combined with yellow), and amber (yellow combined with orange).

There are six major tertiary colors with many variations on each. Essentially, this means that one primary color is featured in greater amounts than another in a mixture of colors. Tertiary colors come about when mixing a primary and a secondary color, opening up many different shades of a particular color.

Using this model, we find green (a combination of blue and yellow), orange (a combination of yellow and red), and purple (a combination of blue and red). As with primary colors, these will change depending on how you approach them, but this will cover color theory for consistency. Secondary colors are achieved specifically using equal parts of primary colors, as well, meaning you must have just as much of one color as the other to achieve the true look of a secondary color. Secondary colors are made by mixing together two primary colors. While what the primary colors are can change depending on what medium you choose to approach them from (color printing’s primary colors differ from those of the light spectrum, for example), this will focus on the traditional primaries as they are presented in art and color theory. Primary colors are the building blocks of all the other colors on the spectrum.

Color wheel primary and secondary colors