By Katelin Mei
We are all familiar with these colours.
Red, blue, and yellow are the 3 primary colours, right? Well, it is not really wrong, but it isn’t 100% right either, and here is why.
The 3 primary colours that you will normally see on a paint wheel, or the ones you were first taught in elementary school, are probably red, blue, and yellow. However, the primary colours have been redefined.
A primary colour is defined as a colour from which all other colours can be obtained through mixing and cannot be created by mixing other colours. This means that red and blue are not primary colours, right?
Well, the primary colours of ink are considered to be magenta, yellow, and cyan which is why, if you buy ink for a printer, the colours provided will usually be magenta, yellow, and cyan. The colour red can be made by mixing yellow and magenta together, and the colour cyan is lighter and produces clearer colours than traditional blue, which is a very dark shade of blue.
But what happens when you mix blue and yellow together? Well, you might say, “green” because that is what happens when you mix blue and yellow paint together, but if we were talking about light, you would get a different answer.
The primary colours of light, however, are red, blue, and green. If we mixed them all together, we would get the primary colours of pigment. If we mixed them using light, red and blue would make magenta, red and green would make yellow, and blue and green would make cyan.
If you blended all the colours together using paint, you would probably get the colour black. However, if you blended all the colours together using light, you would probably get the colour white.
As you can see, the blue and yellow are on opposite sides of the colour wheel for light. If we mixed them we would get a light grey, and not green.
And this is exactly why yellow and blue do not always make green.
Here are the sources . . .
Green Editor: Luke Langlois
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