Blue Plus Yellow: The Magic of Mixing Colors

Grab blue paint and yellow paint and mix them together -- green appears, like magic! Painters have used this trick for hundreds of years. Today we learn why mixing colors works and which colors are the secret starting colors for all the others.

- What the three primary colors are - How to make green, orange, and purple - A new word: primary color - Why painters don't need a huge box of paints

Red, yellow, and blue are called primary colors. They are special because you cannot make them by mixing any other colors together -- they are the starting point for almost every other color a painter uses.

When you mix two primary colors, you get a secondary color: - Blue + Yellow = Green - Red + Yellow = Orange - Red + Blue = Purple This is why an artist with just three tubes of paint (plus white and black) can actually paint almost anything -- a whole rainbow hides inside just three colors!

The painter Piet Mondrian became famous in the 1920s for paintings made almost entirely of red, yellow, and blue squares next to black lines. He wanted to show that you don't need fancy colors to make interesting art -- just the three primary colors, arranged in a bold way.