What Colors Make Purple & How to Mix Different Shades
Are you trying to make purple? Well, this article digs into the following questions: what colors make purple, and how to mix different shades.
When talking about the symbolism of purple, it relates to spirituality, intuition, creativity, and royalty.
What Two Colors Make Purple – RYB
The RYB model is known as a subtractive model, and it refers to colors in pigments, for example, paint. This is part of the color theory that we are taught in school.
Let’s use the RYB color model to make purple. The primary colors on this model are red, yellow and blue. Purple on this model is a secondary color. This is nice and easy, so to make purple, you simply mix red and blue together in roughly equal amounts.
If you have difficulty mixing purple from red and blue, it’s probably for one of two reasons. You have got the balance incorrect. For example, there might be too much red, or too much blue in your mixture. The other reason is, you might not have the best in terms of purity and richness of the two colors that you are mixing.
The purity of a color can pose a problem. Often, colors can have small elements of other colors mixed in. These trace amounts of color can corrupt the outcome, or the final color produced.
Anyone that has ever tried to make purple from mixing red and blue will understand that it can be difficult to achieve. Getting the balance right is extremely important.
If you are simply trying to achieve a lighter or darker shade, then it’s just the case of adding black or white into the mix. Caution when adding black, you will not need much before your mixture becomes too dark.
You can also change the amounts of red and blue. If you wanted to create violet, you would slightly increase the amount of blue, as violet tilts more towards blue than red. You may also require a lighter shade of blue.
You can also use different shades of red and blue to achieve different versions of purple. This includes using colors like magenta, which includes a lot of red, and light, powerful blues like azure. There are a lot of combinations of colors that are going to create all sorts of shades of purple, so, much experimenting will likely be required.
Probably the biggest mistake people make when trying to mix colors and shades is that they use too much of one or more colors too quickly. You will easily ruin your colors by adding too much color. Best practice when it comes to color mixing is to always move slowly and use very small amounts gradually.
