What Colors Make Green & How to Mix Different Shades

When it comes to paint and pigment, what two colors make green, and how do you mix to achieve different lighter and darker shades?

Green is a very popular color. It’s symbolic of life, immortality, growth, and balance. The meaning of the color green.

When it comes to the RGB color model and light, green is one of the three primary colors. This is because our eyes have the ability to detect the medium wavelengths of green.

What Colors Make Green – RGB & CMYK

Green on the RYB color model is a secondary color. This is the model commonly used and taught in art classes in schools. On this model, the two colors that make green are yellow and blue.

On the CMYK color model, green is also a secondary color. This model is the standard for printer ink cartridges. In this model, green is created by mixing cyan and yellow together.

Creating the required colors with other colors

If you don’t have blue, you can create blue by mixing cyan and magenta. Then you can mix your newly created blue with yellow, to create green.

If you have more of an orange than yellow, that can still work when mixed with blue. However, you are going to get a different, and somewhat less pure, green tone. This, of course, depends on the tone of orange used.

How to Mix Different Shades

So, you have your green, but you want to make different lighter tints, and darker shades of green. This is quite simple. To achieve a lighter tint, you mix in white. White will weaken or dilute the color, making it paler.

Different shades of white will give slightly different results. However, other light colors can also be used, like beige. For strong and bright variations of green, you can increase the amount of yellow in the mixture.

To make a darker green, you add and mix black. The purity of the black being used will also obviously affect the final color produced. If you add too much black, it will turn more into brown, which is not what you want.

You can also increase the amount of blue in the mixture. Purple can also be used to darken the color. So, mixing the primary colors, blue and yellow, will give you a strong green. If you mix one primary with one secondary, you will also get green, but something slightly different.