What Colors Make Blue?

Here's the key fact: in traditional color mixing (paint and pigment), blue is a primary color, which means you cannot create true blue by mixing other colors together. Primary colors (red, blue, yellow) are the starting points that all other colors are mixed from.

So how do you get blue? You start with a blue pigment and then adjust it:

• Lighter blue (sky blue): add white to blue.
• Darker blue (navy): add a tiny bit of black, or a touch of its complement (orange), to deepen it.
• Teal / turquoise: mix blue with a bit of green (or yellow).
• Purple-ish blue: add a little red to blue.
• Muted/greyish blue: add a small amount of orange (blue's complementary color) to tone it down.

The exception — mixing light (not paint): Color works differently for light vs. pigment.

• In the RGB (additive) model used by screens, blue is also a primary color of light and can't be made from other light colors.
• In the CMYK printing model, blue is created by combining cyan and magenta inks.

Bottom line: With paints and pigments you can't mix blue from scratch — it's a primary. What you can do is take a blue and modify its shade using white, black, green, or red.