Craft Tips – Color Theory

When mixing colors for painting, the fundamental rule is that there are three colors that cannot be made by mixing other colors together. These three colors are red, blue and yellow; known as the primary colors.

Primary color wheel

Secondary Colors

If you mix two primary colors together, you create what is called a secondary color.

Blue + Red = Purple

Red + Yellow = Orange

Yellow + Blue = Green

The colour wheel can be seen below and this can be used to help remember primary and secondary colours. The secondary colours are in between the primary colours – for example – between red and blue is purple. Quite simply, mixing the primary colours of red and blue paint together will produce the secondary colour purple.

secondary color wheel chart

An important rule of the color wheel is that colours opposite to each other on the color wheel usually work well together as a colour scheme. These are known as COMPLEMENTARY COLOUR.

Tip: It takes only a little of a dark color to change a light color, but it takes considerably more of a light color to change a dark one.

Get your colors out today and try mixing until you get the desired results 🙂

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