Colour Mixing Chart
What Two Colours Actually Make

A colour mixing chart answers one question quickly: put these two colours together, what comes out? It is the sort of thing you want on the wall rather than in your head, because the answers are not guessable. Yellow and blue make green, which most people know. Yellow and purple make a brown, which almost nobody predicts.

This page is that chart, and then the reasoning behind it. Every swatch below was produced by the same pigment model that runs the Color Mixer, so the chart and the tool cannot disagree with each other.

(Color mixing chart and colour mixing chart are the same thing. Both spellings appear here because both get searched.)

The Colour Mixing Chart

Six hues — the three primaries and the three secondaries — give fifteen pairs. Equal parts of each:

Two things are worth noticing before moving on. First, the top of the table is bright and the bottom is not: pairs of primaries stay vivid, while pairs involving secondaries slide toward mud. Second, five of the fifteen results are some kind of brown. That is not a defect in the chart. It is the single most important fact about subtractive mixing, and the rest of this article is mostly about why.

Why Yellow and Blue Make Green

The usual explanation is that yellow and blue “contain” green between them. They do not. Nothing is being added.

Yellow paint looks yellow because it absorbs blue light and reflects everything else — red and green. Blue paint absorbs red and reflects green and blue. Put both pigments in the same puddle and every particle keeps doing its own job: the yellow absorbs the blue, the blue absorbs the red, and the only part of the spectrum neither of them attacks is green. What reaches your eye is what survived.

This is why it is called subtractive mixing. Each pigment you add removes more of the spectrum, and the mixture is always darker than the darker of the two things that went into it. Try to find a counter-example in the chart above and you will not.

Three Primaries, and What They Cannot Reach

The artist's chart is built on red, yellow and blue, on the basis that those three cannot be mixed from anything else. Mix two and you get a secondary:

• Red + yellow → orange
• Yellow + blue → green
• Red + blue → purple

That much holds up. What is usually left out is the limit. Red, yellow and blue are not the true subtractive primaries — cyan, magenta and yellow are, which is why every printer on earth is loaded with CMYK ink rather than RYB.

The practical consequence is that a three-tube RYB set cannot reach certain colours at all. Clean turquoise and vivid magenta are outside its range, not because you mixed badly but because the pigments absorb overlapping parts of the spectrum. Anyone who has tried to match a bright teal with a school paint set has met this wall without being told it was there. Adding white will lighten what you have; it will not make it more turquoise.

Every Road Leads to Brown

Brown is the colour people most often want a chart for, and it is also the one they produce by accident more than any other. Both facts have the same cause: brown is what you get when all three primaries are present at once.

Once you know that, several separate-looking recipes turn out to be the same recipe:

Orange already contains red and yellow, so orange plus blue is red plus yellow plus blue. Green already contains yellow and blue, so red plus green is the same three again. Purple contains red and blue, so yellow plus purple completes the set too. Four different-sounding instructions, one underlying event.

It also explains the accident. A palette turns brown over an afternoon because each unwashed brush carries a trace of a third primary into a two-primary mixture. Nothing is going wrong; the maths is simply working.

Note how much the ratio matters here. Equal thirds gives a near-black mud, while two parts red, two parts yellow and one part blue gives a usable mid brown. If you want brown rather than sludge, keep the blue down.

Same Two Colours, Five Different Results

Most charts show one square per pair, which quietly implies there is one answer. There is not — the ratio moves the result along a whole arc. Yellow to blue:

And red to yellow, which is the arc most people actually want when they say “orange”:

The arcs are not symmetrical, and that is the useful part. Blue overwhelms yellow: at 1:1 the green is already deep, and by 1:3 there is barely any yellow left in it. Getting a light yellow-green needs something like nine parts yellow to one part blue. In a real paint set this asymmetry is even stronger, which is the origin of the standard advice to always add the dark colour to the light one, a little at a time, rather than the other way round.

Adding White, Black and Grey

White and black are not on the wheel, because neither is a hue. They change how light a colour is rather than which colour it is, and they have their own names for what they produce: a colour plus white is a tint, plus black is a shade, plus grey is a tone.

Black is the one to be careful with. It does not simply darken — it dulls, and with some hues it changes them outright. Yellow plus black is the famous case: it does not give a dark yellow, it gives olive green, and no amount of stirring will talk it out of that. If you want a darker yellow that is still yellow, reach for a brown or a touch of its complement instead of black.

If you want a full ramp rather than one step, the Shades & Tints Generator will build ten of each from a single starting colour.

The Same Pair, a Different Answer

Everything above is about pigment. Point the same question at light and the answers change completely, because light adds rather than subtracts. Two beams on the same wall deliver more of the spectrum, not less, so mixtures get lighter instead of darker.

Red and green make a muddy dark brown in paint and pure yellow in light. That is not a rounding difference or a quirk of one model — it is two different physical processes being asked the same question.

The reason this matters outside a physics lesson is that your screen is additive. Every pixel is red, green and blue light adding together, which is why the three of them at full strength give white. A design tool that averages two hex codes is doing neither of these things; it is doing arithmetic on numbers, which usually lands somewhere between the two answers and matches neither.

Why Your Paint Will Not Match Exactly

A chart like this predicts the direction of a mixture reliably. It cannot predict the exact swatch, and it is worth being clear about why, because the gap catches people out.

• Tinting strength varies enormously. Phthalo blue will take over a mixture at a fraction of the volume, while many earth colours barely register. Equal parts on paper is rarely equal parts in effect — a chart assumes it is.
• “Red” is not one colour. Cadmium red leans orange and cool alizarin leans violet. Mix each with blue and you get two noticeably different purples, because one of them was already carrying yellow.
• Wet is not dry. Acrylics dry darker, watercolours dry lighter, and oils shift as the medium settles.
• Opacity matters. A transparent glaze over a dry layer is not the same as two pigments stirred together, even with identical colours.

None of that makes a chart useless — it makes it a starting point. Use it to work out which recipe to try and roughly what ratio, then mix a small test swatch and let it dry before committing to a whole canvas.

Printing the Chart

This page is set up to print cleanly: press Ctrl+P (or Cmd+P) and the navigation, table of contents and share buttons drop away, leaving the tables. Choose “Save as PDF” in the destination list if you want a file rather than paper, and make sure background graphics are enabled in your print settings or the swatches will come out blank.

A printed chart is worth having next to an easel, but it will always be a fixed set of pairs. When you need a pair that is not on it, or a ratio between the steps, the interactive version has no such limit.