After you sat down to paint one afternoon, you suddenly realised that your bottle of green paint was dry and you were planning to complete the scenery you started yesterday. What to do now? Well, you can always ‘make’ the colour green. Yes you can, just mix red and blue colours and you have a nice shade of green! Want to make more colours, read on….

Let us look at how we can make a new colour by mixing two or more colours and what are primary and secondary colours.

There are just three primary colours — red, yellow and blue. You can’t make them by mixing any two or more colours.

Next are the secondary colours which are green, orange and violet, we get them by mixing two of the primary colours. On the colour wheel, the secondary colours are located between the colours they are made from.

There are six tertiary colours which we get by mixing a primary colour with an adjacent secondary colour, and these are red-orange, red-violet, yellow-green, yellow-orange, blue-green and blue-violet.

Black, white and grey are neutral, achromatic colours. We can make a colour light by adding white to it, like we can add white to the colour red to make pink, and if we add the colour black to red, we will make it darker and get a nice deep maroon shade. So you can save money by buying just the primary colours and black and white, and make as many colours as you fancy. — Compiled by Aamnah Arshad

Let’s now see which colours we can mix to get a new one.

• Mix red and yellow to create orange. Orange is a secondary colour.

• Mix yellow and blue to create green. Green is a secondary colour.

• Mix blue and red to make purple. Purple is a secondary colour.

• Mix yellow and green to create yellow green or chartreuse. Chartreuse is a tertiary colour.

• Mix blue and green to create blue green or aquamarine or turquoise. Aquamarine or turquoise are tertiary colours.

• Mix blue and purple to create blue purple or violet. Violet is a tertiary colour.

• Mix red and purple to create red purple or magenta. Magenta is a tertiary colour.

• Mix red and orange to create red orange or vermilion. Vermilion is a tertiary colour.

• Mix yellow and orange to together to create yellow orange or marigold. Marigold is a tertiary colour.

• Mix red and green to create brown. You can add white or black to the brown to make it darker or lighter.

• Mix white with a colour to create a tint, e.g., mix white with red to create pink.

• Mix black with a colour to create a shade, e.g., mix black with red to create burgundy.