On one very important condition: The primary you are substituting must still be biased towards it's secondary colour.įor example, you could replace Lemon Yellow for Cadmium Yellow Light or Cadmium Yellow Pale as they are both still biased towards the green side of the colour wheel. You can however easily substitute these colours for different ones and still be able to mix virtually any colour under the sun. Here is the wheel with the clean tertiaries added:

So instead only being able to mix one version of each secondary colour as with the standard colour wheel, we can now mix twelve versions of the secondary colours.Īre you starting to see the possibilities that are opening up to you by using the split primary method? Now imagine how many variations of tertiaries you can get by playing around with different ratios of each of these mixes.

We can now similarly get four different versions of green and orange as well This gives you four different versions of purple without even adding any tube yellow or white to the mixture. In each scenario you will get a different purple. You could even use both the red and the blue that are outside the slice if you wanted to. In our purple example if we wanted a duller purple then we can use either the red or the blue outside the purple “pizza slice”. The minute you mix colours together that are outside the “pizza slice”, you are introducing some of the opposite colour and will start to dull down / shadow your colour. Colours mixed inside the slice give you “clean” mixes. The rule then is to only mix colours together that are inside their individual “pizza slice” when we want to keep our colours vibrant. Here you can see what the new primaries look like: In other words with the split primary colour wheel we use two blues, two yellows and two greens. That way we are sure that we don't accidentally introduce some of the complimentary colour into the mix, thus keeping our colour as vibrant. If we now want to mix a vibrant purple, we use the blue and the red that are biased towards purple. With the two reds, one is biased towards orange and the other towards purple. The one is biased towards green, the other towards purple. Each version of the primary is biased towards it's secondary colour.įor example, we use a yellow biased towards the orange side of the wheel as well as a yellow biased towards the green side of the wheel. In order to do this we use two colours for each primary. In order to keep our colours as vibrant as possible when mixing our paints we need to ensure we don't inadvertently introduce some of the complimentary colour into the mixture. The concept behind the split primary colour wheel is that our primaries are not perfect primaries, but biased towards one side or the other on the colour wheel.

Primary colors in the color wheel