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by Linda Carson

big black pig studio
98 King St. N., Waterloo Ontario Canada
www.bigblackpig.com

Primary Colours: Yellow, Blue & Red

If you have a late-night painting emergency and you've run out of green paint, you can mix yellow and blue paint together for a do-it-yourself green.

On the other hand, if you run out of yellow paint at 3:00 a.m., you might as well call it a night and get some sleep until the stores reopen. If you don't have some yellow paint, you can't magic yellow up out of other colours. That's why yellow is a primary colour. To make any yellow-ish colour at all, you need to have some sort of yellow paint to begin with.

Similarly, you need something blue to get blue. Blue is also a primary colour.

You need something red to make red. Red is the third primary colour.

When you mix a couple of primary colours together you produce secondary colours. When you mix all three primary colours together you produce unsaturated or low-intensity colours like earth tones and flesh tones.

Note:
The yellow/blue/red notion of primary colours is not the whole story. It's a practical simplification that works just fine for most purposes, and it is the answer everybody expects from you on the Art Vocabulary quiz. However, some readers worry about the gory technical details.

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