What Colors Make Purple?

Tai Chi.

· 27 Oct 2021

What Colors Make Purple?

The colors red and blue make purple. The key is finding the right tube of red and blue to give you the hue of purple you want.

In elementary school, we were taught that mixing red and blue makes purple. Likewise, yellow and blue make green, and red and yellow make orange. In other words, if you mix any two primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) you get a secondary color (orange, green, and purple).

The reality however is very much different- blue and red don’t really make purple, or so it seems. As it turns out, there are at least 50 shades of red and even more shades of blue. Depending on which shade of blue you mix with any red, the result may not exactly be purple.

So, how do you make purple?  And what colors do you need to make purple?
Whether you are an artist looking to mix colors to make purple, or a painter striving to get that perfect purple color, there are two things you need to know;

1.    Every primary color carries a color bias. This is the additional color that you can’t see but affects the shade of the color. For example, cadmium red carries a color bias of yellow, and so does magenta. Mixing any of these colors will not give you an exact purple.

2.    The amount of blue or red you add to the mixture determines the shade of purple you get. If you put more red than blue, you get predominantly red tints like magenta, orchid, red-violet, merlot, and fuchsia. Conversely, if you add more blue than red, you will get bluer tints like periwinkle, lavender, indigo, blue-violet, mauve, and lilac.

The Secret

The secret to making a perfect purple is to mix a blue shade that has a bias of red and a red shade with a bias of blue.

• blue-red shades include permanent rose, primary magenta, and quinacridone magenta.

• The best red-blue shade is ultramarine blue.

If you mix these two colors, you will get a perfect shade of purple. The trick is knowing how to recognize the color bias in a primary color. For example, does it have a green, yellow, white, blue, or red bias?

Knowing this will help you predict your end result because certain colors affect how the purple will come out. For example, blues with a yellow bias result in a dirty/muddy purple that’s not pleasing to the eye.

Tints and Shades

color bias aside, there is another way to alter the color purple. You can make it lighter or darker. The tint is when you make a certain color lighter by mixing in some white to it and shade is making a color darker by adding some black to it. For example, lavender has a purple tint because it’s diluted with white. Conversely, aubergine is a shade of purple because it’s diluted with black. You can also make a tone of color by adding grey, but the result will be a muddy-looking color.

Is Purple the Same as Violet?

Often, we use the term violet to refer to the color purple. However, these are two completely different colors in the color spectrum. In fact, they are on the far end opposite sides of each other. While purple is a mixture of blue and red, violet is a spectral color that appears on its own. Therefore, though the two colors are placed next to each other on the color wheel, purple is right next to red, while violet is next to blue on the color spectrum.

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