Primary Colors

color · art · science · light

Three color bases. Artists use red, yellow, and blue as their primary colors for painting because mixing any two of them creates new colors. When you blend all three together, you get brown or dark colors.

Light works differently. Television and computer screens use red, green, and blue light as their primary colors instead. These three lights mix together in your eyes to create the millions of colors you see on your screen.

Printing uses different primaries. Printers use cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink to print every color in magazines and photos. By layering tiny dots of these inks, they can fool your eyes into seeing any color imaginable.

Your eyes do the mixing. Your eyes contain special cells that sense red, green, and blue light, and your brain combines those signals to see all the colors in the world. This is why different primary colors work for different purposes.

The mixing rule. When you mix two primary colors together, you get a secondary color, like orange from red and yellow. This is how artists and scientists can predict and create almost any color they want.