Exploring Secondary Colours, Tints and Shades
Senior 2 · Fine Arts
Exploring Secondary Colours, Tints and Shades
Lesson 1 of 4
22 min
A painter with only three colours of paint can still make hundreds of colours. Sign writers in Nyabugogo, muralists painting shop walls and textile designers all rely on this. Mixing well saves money, because you buy fewer paints, and it gives you colours that sit together naturally. This lesson is about the first and most important mixes: the secondary colours.
On the wheel, every secondary colour sits halfway between the two primaries that make it, and directly opposite the third primary, the one it does not contain.
Real paints are not perfect. Most reds lean slightly towards orange or towards violet, and most blues lean towards green or towards violet. If your red leans to orange and your blue leans to green, together they contain a little of all three primaries, and the violet turns muddy brown. For the brightest secondary, choose two primaries that lean towards each other: a crimson-type red with an ultramarine-type blue for violet; a lemon yellow with a greenish blue for green.
Mugisha needs orange for a poster. He puts a spoonful of yellow on his palette first and adds red a little at a time, stirring after each touch. Why this order? Red is a much stronger, darker colour than yellow. A small amount of red changes yellow a lot, but it takes a lot of yellow to change red. Starting with the light colour and adding the dark one wastes less paint. When he adds only a touch of red he gets yellow-orange, a tertiary colour; more red gives true orange; still more gives red-orange. Changing the proportion of the two primaries changes the result.
The English engraver Moses Harris published one of the first printed colour wheels in his book The Natural System of Colours, around 1766. Look at the three triangles in the centre: red, yellow and blue, overlapping to make black where all three meet. Around them, the named secondaries (orange, green and purple) sit between the primaries, and the mixtures between them, such as "yellow-orange" and "blue-green", fill the gaps: the same system you have just painted, nearly 260 years later.
Tip
Light first, dark in small touches. Always start with the lighter colour and add the darker one bit by bit. Memory hook for the secondaries: "Ripe oranges, yellow-blue grass, blue-red violets." In the exam, remember that each secondary sits opposite the primary it does not contain.
Name the two primaries that make green, and the primary that sits opposite green on the wheel.
Solution: yellow and blue make green. The opposite primary is red, the one green does not contain.
Keza mixes red and blue but gets a dull brownish violet. Give a likely reason and a fix.
Solution: her red probably leans towards orange (it contains some yellow), so the mix contains all three primaries and turns muddy. Use a red that leans towards violet, such as crimson, with a blue that leans towards violet, such as ultramarine.
What colour do you get from mixing a lot of blue with a little green? What type of colour is it?
Solution: blue-green, a tertiary colour (a primary mixed with its neighbouring secondary).
You need a large amount of orange. Which paint should you put on the palette first, and why?
Solution: yellow first, because it is the lighter, weaker colour. Adding red to yellow in small touches reaches orange quickly and wastes less paint than trying to lighten red with yellow.
Remember
Sources and credits
