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Color Basics, Color Identification System and Color Schemes

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The key takeaways are that there are primary, secondary and tertiary colors. Primary colors cannot be made by combining other colors, secondary colors are made by combining two primary colors, and tertiary colors are made by combining a primary and secondary color.

The three primary colors are red, yellow and blue.

The three secondary colors are orange, purple and green.

1.

Color Basics, Color identification system and color schemes

Color Theory 101

Primary Colors
Primary colors are those you can't create by combining two or more other colors together.
They're a lot like prime numbers, which can't be created by multiplying two
other numbers together.

There are three primary colors:

 Red
 Yellow
 Blue

Think of primary colors as your parent colors, anchoring your design in a general color scheme.
Any one or combination of these colors can give your brand guardrails when you move to explore
other shades, tones, and tints (we'll talk about those in just a minute).

When designing or even painting with primary colors, don't feel restricted to just the three
primary colors listed above. Orange isn't a primary color, for example, but brands can certainly
use orange as their dominant color (as we at HubSpot know this quite well).

Knowing which primary colors create orange is your ticket to identifying colors that might go well
with orange -- given the right shade, tone, or tint. This brings us to our next type of color ...
Secondary Colors

Secondary colors are the colors that are formed by combining any two of the three primary colors
listed above. Check out the color theory model above -- see how each secondary color is
supported by two of the three primary colors?

There are three secondary colors: orange, purple, and green. You can create each one using two
of the three primary colors. Here are the general rules of secondary color creation:
 Red + Yellow = Orange
 Blue + Red = Purple

 Yellow + Blue = Green


Keep in mind that the color mixtures above only work if you use the purest form of each primary
color. This pure form is known as a color's hue, and you'll see how these hues compare to the
variants underneath each color in the color wheel below.
Tertiary Colors

Tertiary colors are created when you mix a primary color with secondary color.

From here, color gets a little more complicated. And if you want to learn how the experts choose
color in their design, you've got to first understand all the other components of color.

The most important component of tertiary colors is that not every primary color can match with
a secondary color to create a tertiary color. For example, red can't mix in harmony with green,
and blue can't mix in harmony with orange -- both mixtures would result in a slightly brown color
(unless of course that's what you're looking for).

Instead, tertiary colors are created when a primary color mixes with a secondary color that comes
next to it on the color wheel below. There are six tertiary colors that fit this requirement:

 Red + Purple = Red-Purple (magenta)


 Red + Orange = Red-Orange (vermillion)
 Blue + Purple = Blue-Purple (violet)
 Blue + Green = Blue-Green (teal)
 Yellow + Orange = Yellow-Orange (amber)
 Yellow + Green = Yellow-Green (chartreuse)
The Color Theory Wheel

Okay, great. So now you know what the "main" colors are, but you and I both know that choosing
color, especially on a computer, has much wider range than 12 basic colors.

This is the impetus behind the color wheel, a circle graph that charts each primary, secondary,
and tertiary color -- as well as their respective hues, tints, tones, and shades. Visualizing colors in
this way helps you choose color schemes by showing you how each color relates to the color that
comes next to it on a rainbow color scale. (As you probably know, the colors of a rainbow, in
order, are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.)

When choosing colors for a color scheme, the color wheel gives you opportunities to create
brighter, lighter, softer, and darker colors by mixing white, black, and gray with the original
colors. These mixes create the color variants described below:

Hue

Hue is pretty much synonymous to what we actually mean when we said the word "color." All of
the primary and secondary colors, for instance, are "hues."

Hues are important to remember when combining two primary colors to create a secondary
color. If you don't use the hues of the two primary colors you're mixing together, you won't
generate the hue of the secondary color. This is because a hue has the fewest other colors inside
it. By mixing two primary colors that carry other tints, tones, and shades inside them, you're
technically adding more than two colors to the mixture -- making your final color dependent on
the compatibility of more than two colors.

If you were to mix the hues of red and blue together, for instance, you'd get purple, right? But
mix a tint of red with the hue of blue, and you'll get a slightly tinted purple in return.
Shade

You may recognize the term "shade" because it's used quite often to refer to light and dark
versions of the same hue. But actually, a shade is technically the color that you get when you add
black to any given hue. The various "shades" just refer to how much black you're adding.
Tint

A tint is the opposite of a shade, but people don't often distinguish between a color's shade and
a color's tint. You get a different tint when you add white to a color. So, a color can have a range
of both shades and tints.

Tone (or Saturation)

You can also add both white and black to a color to create a tone. Tone and saturation essentially
mean the same thing, but most people will use saturation if they're talking about colors being
created for digital images. Tone will be used more often for painting.

In color theory, a color scheme is the choice of colors used in design for a range of media. ... Color
schemes can contain different "Monochromatic" shades of a single color; for example, a color
schemethat mixes different shades of green, ranging from very light (white), to very neutral (gray), to
very dark (black).

https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-a-color-scheme-definition-types-examples.html

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