That's because this pure pigment leans away from Orange and mixes harmoniously with the cool pure Blue. Pictured above is a graphic displaying red, lime and blue as the 3 primary colors (along with their HTML hexadecimal codes). The color wheel is organized into primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. In this example, if you want to mix a rich Purple instead, use a cool pure Red such as Quinacridone Red. In order to understand how colors relate to one another, you need a firm understanding of the color wheel. This result is only great if you actually want a rich Brown. In this case it's pure Blue + pure Orangey/Red. Brown is the neutralized result we get from mixing Complementary colors. In our example above, Cadmium Red is a warm pure hue, leaning toward Orange. Blue and Orange are Complementary Colors. As a result, there are many different pure Yellow, Red and Blue pigment paints available. Paint is manufactured with organic, mineral and chemical pigments. They are unmixed pigments that can't be created by mixing other colors. To understand why, we need to look at paint pigments. A Primary Yellow, Red or Blue paint color usually refers to a paint that contains only one pigment. For instance, if you mix Cadmium Red + Ultramarine Blue, you'll likely be sadly disappointed. If you were expecting a deep rich Violet (Purple), the resulting Brown will be a total surprise. There are six tertiary colors: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green.

The problem is paint pigment never works like that in real life. Tertiary colors can be found in between primary and secondary colors on the color wheel. However, as I wrote in a previous Color Wheel post, color is not an exact science.

So there we have it: a complete color wheel with primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, plus their tints, shades, and tones. So in other words, you could conceivably mix gazillions of colors with only three pure Primar y pigments of Yellow, Red and Blue. Of course that's what they teach us in school. Pure Color Primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, without the addition of white, black, or a third color, are pure (or saturated) colors.

Color wheel primary and tertiary