Color mixing chart: what colors make what?

Tap two or three paints on the color mixing board above and it shows the colour they make, with its name and colour code. Use the plus and minus buttons to change how much of each paint goes in: one part red with three parts white gives a much lighter pink than one part of each.

The board has 47 paints. That gives 1,081 different pairs and 16,215 sets of three, before you even change the parts, so the tables below can only show a selection. For any other colour, see the color names library: it lists 1,024 named colours with the closest paint recipe for each.

Basic color mixing chart

Red, yellow and blue are the three primary colors of paint. Yellow with red makes orange and yellow with blue makes green. Red with blue makes a purple too, but a dark, muted one, because ordinary red paint absorbs most of the violet light. For a bright purple, painters use a pinkish red such as magenta with the blue.

How to make common colors from seven basic paints

These recipes use only a basic set: red, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white and black. The board searched every mix of two or three of them, in whole parts, for the closest match to each colour.

"Approximate" means the basic set cannot reach that colour exactly. Very bright colours often need a paint of their own, because mixing always makes colours a little duller.

Mixing three colors

A third paint is how you fine-tune a colour: white makes a pastel, black makes a deep shade, and a touch of the opposite colour makes it softer and more natural.

Red mixed with other colors

Yellow mixed with other colors

Blue mixed with other colors

Green mixed with other colors

Orange mixed with other colors

Purple mixed with other colors

Pink mixed with other colors

Brown mixed with other colors

White mixed with other colors

Black mixed with other colors

Color mixing rules that always work

• Add white to make a tint: lighter and softer (red becomes pink).
• Add black to make a shade: deeper and darker (red becomes maroon). Use very little, because black is strong.
• Add grey to make a tone: quieter and less bright.
• Mix opposites on the colour wheel (red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple) to get browns and greys.
• Start with the lighter paint and add the darker one a little at a time. It takes a lot of yellow to change blue, but only a drop of blue to change yellow.

How the board works out the color

Paint does not mix like light on a screen. The board uses the Kubelka-Munk model of pigment mixing (through the open-source spectral.js library): each paint is turned into a curve of how much light it reflects at every wavelength, and the curves are combined the way layers of pigment absorb and scatter light. That is why blue and yellow give green here, and yellow and black give olive, as they do on a palette.

The name shown is the closest match among 928 named colours: the standard web colour names (W3C) and the names people gave to colours in the xkcd colour survey. Real paints vary by brand and pigment, so treat the result as a guide and test on paper first.

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