Using Color: Tertiary Colors

The final component on the color wheels are tertiary colors, or as I like to call them, the “in-between” colors. Now, to explain this a bit more clearly, imagine that you’ve just mixed the colors red and yellow in order to make orange. However, you seemed to have spilled more red paint into the mixture than yellow. So now what do you have? Of course, you may be thinking, “red orange,” which is not only correct but it is also one of the most well-known tertiary colors.

RYB

RGB & CMYK

As you can see, there are quite a few tertiary colors within the color wheels that are imbedded in between the primary and secondary colors. In fact, there are two tertiary colors for each primary color. For RYB, many artists simply mix more of one primary color on their palette in order to create a tertiary color. That way any mistakes in creating their new colors can be corrected just by adding in more of a certain color.

A much easier and accurate way artists achieve these tertiary colors is by mixing the primary and secondary colors together. Going back to my example from earlier, making red orange would be as simple as mixing red and orange together.

The same applies for RGB and CMYK. Although I stated in my last posts that these two color formats are used differently, the way they are mixed are exactly the same as the traditional RYB format. And yes, to make matters even easier, the tertiary colors for each of these two color formats are indeed the same.

Please reference these color wheels when using color for future graphic design projects.