Tertiary colors are produced by mixing a primary with an adjacent secondary. From red-orange to blue-green, learn the six tertiary hues and how artists use them.
Open a box of 12 colored pencils and you are looking at primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. The primaries are red, yellow, and blue. The secondaries are orange, green, and purple. The remaining six are tertiary colors: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet. They are the hues that fill the gaps between the primaries and secondaries on the color wheel, and they are the colors that make a painting feel complete rather than schematic. Without tertiary colors, a palette is a diagram. With them, it is a language.
Tertiary colors are produced by mixing one primary color with one adjacent secondary color on the color wheel. They sit between their two parent colors, both visually and in terms of pigment composition. The six tertiary colors in the traditional RYB model are red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet. Together with the three primaries and three secondaries, they form the twelve-part color wheel that is the standard reference in art education.
This entry covers what tertiary colors are, the debate over their definition, how they fit into the color wheel, and how artists use them in practice.
The standard twelve-part color wheel has twelve positions. Three belong to primary colors (red, yellow, blue). Three belong to secondary colors (orange, green, purple). The remaining six are tertiary colors, each placed exactly between a primary and its neighboring secondary. The six tertiaries are: red-orange (between red and orange), yellow-orange (between yellow and orange), yellow-green (between yellow and green), blue-green (between blue and green), blue-violet (between blue and violet), and red-violet (between red and violet).
Each tertiary color is a mix of roughly equal parts of a primary and an adjacent secondary. Since the secondary is itself a mix of two primaries, a tertiary color contains two parts of one primary and one part of another. Red-orange, for example, is red plus orange, which is red plus yellow. The result is two parts red, one part yellow. This is why tertiary colors retain the character of their dominant primary while shifting toward the adjacent hue.
The naming convention is consistent: the primary color is named first, followed by the secondary. Red-orange, not orange-red. Yellow-green, not green-yellow. This convention signals which primary is dominant in the mixture.
There is a debate in color theory about the definition of tertiary colors. The traditional definition, used by theorists like Moses Harris in the 18th century and Josef Albers in the 20th, defines tertiary colors as the mixture of two secondary colors. Under this definition, mixing orange and green produces olive, mixing orange and purple produces brown, and mixing green and purple produces slate. These are muted, neutral colors that contain all three primaries. The more common modern definition, used in most art education and digital design, defines tertiary colors as the mixture of a primary and an adjacent secondary. The term "intermediate colors" is sometimes used for this definition to distinguish it from the traditional one. In practice, most contemporary art education and digital tools use "tertiary" for the six primary-plus-secondary mixes on the twelve-part wheel.
The twelve-part color wheel is the standard reference in art education. It was popularized by Johannes Itten (1888-1967), a Swiss expressionist painter and Bauhaus teacher, in his book The Art of Color (1961). Itten arranged the twelve hues in a circle with the three primaries at equal intervals, the three secondaries between them, and the six tertiaries filling the remaining positions. The wheel is a teaching tool, not a scientific model. It does not account for the complexities of subtractive color mixing or the differences between pigment and light. But it remains the most widely used framework for understanding color relationships in art education.
The RYB wheel used in painting produces one set of tertiary colors. The RGB wheel, used for screens and digital design, produces a different set. In the RGB model, the primary colors are red, green, and blue, and the tertiary colors are rose (red plus magenta), orange (red plus yellow), chartreuse (green plus yellow), spring green (green plus cyan), azure (blue plus cyan), and violet (blue plus magenta). The CMYK model, used in print, mirrors the RGB logic. The tertiary colors shift depending on the model because the starting primaries are different.
The Munsell Color System, developed by Albert Henry Munsell in 1905, does not use the primary-secondary-tertiary hierarchy. Instead, Munsell identified five principal hues (red, yellow, green, blue, purple) and five intermediate hues placed between them (yellow-red, green-yellow, blue-green, purple-blue, red-purple). The Munsell system is more perceptually uniform than the RYB wheel and is used in scientific research and industrial design, but the RYB wheel remains the standard in art education.
Tertiary colors are where painting gets specific. A portrait painter does not paint skin with primary red and secondary orange. They paint with red-orange, yellow-orange, and red-violet, shifting between these tertiary hues to capture the subtle temperature changes in flesh. A landscape painter does not paint trees with primary blue and secondary green. They paint with blue-green, yellow-green, and dozens of variations between them. The tertiary colors are the colors of the natural world, and they are the colors that make a painting feel observed rather than invented.
The Impressionists relied heavily on tertiary colors. Claude Monet (1840-1926) used blue-green, yellow-green, and red-violet in his Water Lilies series (1896-1926) to capture the subtle color shifts in water and foliage. The paintings are built from tertiary hues, not from primaries. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) used red-orange and yellow-orange for skin tones, shifting between warm and cool tertiaries to model the face. The Impressionist palette is fundamentally a tertiary palette, which is why it feels so naturalistic despite its high saturation.
The Post-Impressionists used tertiary colors for expressive purposes. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) used yellow-green in The Night Cafe (1888) for the unnatural, sickly lighting. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) used blue-green and red-orange to build form, constructing volumes from patches of warm and cool tertiary color rather than from light and shadow. Cezanne's use of tertiary color as a structural tool influenced Cubism and the development of modern painting.
The Fauves used tertiary colors at full saturation for emotional impact. Henri Matisse (1869-1954) used red-violet and blue-green in The Dance (1910) and Music (1910). Andre Derain (1880-1954) used yellow-orange and blue-green in his London scenes. The Fauves treated tertiary colors as independent expressive elements, freed from any obligation to describe reality.
Color field painters used tertiary colors to create subtle emotional effects. Mark Rothko (1903-1970) used red-orange and blue-violet in paintings like No. 14 (1960). Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) used blue-green and yellow-orange in her soak-stained paintings, including Mountains and Sea (1952). The tertiary hues create transitions between colors that are more nuanced than the jumps between primaries and secondaries.
Monet's Water Lilies series (1896-1926) is built from tertiary colors. The blues, blue-greens, yellow-greens, and red-violets in the pond water are all tertiary hues. Monet used tertiaries to capture the subtle color shifts that occur when light reflects off water through vegetation. The painting would be impossible with only primary and secondary colors.
Cezanne used tertiary colors as a structural tool. In Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-1906), he built the landscape from patches of blue-green, yellow-orange, and red-violet. The tertiary colors create a sense of volume and depth without traditional shading. Cezanne's use of tertiary color as form influenced Picasso, Braque, and the development of Cubism.
Van Gogh used tertiary colors for emotional effect. The Night Cafe (1888) uses sickly yellow-greens and clashing red-oranges. The Starry Night (1889) uses blue-violet and yellow-orange. Van Gogh's tertiary colors are expressive, not descriptive. He chose them for their emotional charge, not for their accuracy.
Frankenthaler's Mountains and Sea (1952) uses blue-green, yellow-orange, and red-violet in thin, soak-stained washes on unprimed canvas. The tertiary colors create transitions that feel like watercolor rather than oil painting. Frankenthaler demonstrated that tertiary colors, used transparently, can create atmospheric effects that primary and secondary colors cannot.
Matisse used red-violet and blue-green in The Dance (1910) and Music (1910). The tertiary colors provide the temperature shifts that give the paintings their energy. The red-violet figures against the blue-green ground create a warm-cool contrast that is more nuanced than a simple red-green complementary pair.
To mix a tertiary color, combine a primary with its adjacent secondary in roughly equal proportions. Red plus orange produces red-orange. Blue plus green produces blue-green. The exact ratio determines where the resulting color sits between the two parents. More primary shifts the color toward the primary. More secondary shifts it toward the secondary.
A common mistake is to mix a primary with a non-adjacent secondary. Red plus green, for example, produces a neutral brown or gray, not a tertiary color. This is because red and green are complementary colors, and mixing complements neutralizes the hue. Tertiary colors require adjacent hues, not opposite ones.
To identify a tertiary color in a painting, look for hues that do not match any primary or secondary. If a color looks like red but is shifted toward orange, it is red-orange. If a color looks like blue but is shifted toward green, it is blue-green. The ability to identify tertiary colors comes with practice and is a fundamental skill for color mixing in painting.
One practical application: when a color on your palette is too saturated or too pure, adding a small amount of its adjacent tertiary can soften it without neutralizing it the way a complementary color would. This is how painters create the subtle color variations that make a painting feel observed rather than schematic.
Tertiary colors are part of the color wheel and color theory. Complementary colors include tertiary pairs like red-orange and blue-green. Analogous colors often include tertiary hues in their adjacent groupings. Hue is the dimension of color that tertiary colors extend. Warm colors and cool colors both include tertiary hues. Tints and shades of tertiary colors are created by adding white or black. For more on color theory, read our post on color theory fundamentals, or explore our guide to reading a painting.
Create a twelve-part color wheel using only red, yellow, and blue paint. Mix the three secondaries first: orange, green, and purple. Then mix the six tertiaries by combining each primary with its adjacent secondary. Place all twelve hues in a circle. The exercise teaches two things: how to mix colors systematically, and how much variation exists between the primary and secondary positions on the wheel. For more exercises, read our guide to color theory fundamentals, or explore our entry on color.
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