Colour Wheel: Mixing Primary & Secondary Colours

The colours most widely known as the primary colours are red, green and blue. These are used, for example, in CRT displays, to make a wide range of other colours. In pigments and dye mixing, such as printing, however, the primary colours used are cyan, magenta and yellow.

Mixing any two primary colours gives you a secondary colour: cyan + magenta = violet; cyan + yellow = green; and magenta + yellow = red.

In theory, mixing all three of these primary colours will give greyish black, but in practice, they tend to produce brownish colours. For this reason, in printing, black is also used and not only for the quality, but also mixing three colours uses more ink and takes longer to dry.

Mixing a primary colour with a secondary colour gives a tertiary colour, for example, cyan-violet  or yellow-green.

In this worksheet, the objective is for students to mix the primary colours to obtain the secondaries. Ensure that they do not mix the pigments directly on the paper! They will have to mix them on a tray (or equivalent) first, and then transfer them onto the worksheet.

Please see this other post, too.

Later, after they have succeeded in making the secondary colours, they will prepare a wheel of 12 colours (3 primary + 3 secondary + 6 tertiary colours).

This worksheet is also available in Scribd. For examples of students' work on the colour wheel, see here.

Colour Wheel: Mixing Colours

View More Presentations from Chiew Pang.

Most of the credit for the worksheet goes to José Alberto.