What Colors Make Blue? The Honest Answer and Shades

Short answer: in the traditional red-yellow-blue color wheel that most of us learned at school, blue is a primary color, so you can't mix it from other paint colors. But in the cyan-magenta-yellow system used by printers, cyan + magenta makes blue. Once you have a blue, you can mix it with white, black, green, purple and others to make every shade from baby blue to navy.

Why blue is (usually) a primary color

Primary colors are the starting colors you mix everything else from. In the classic art-class model, the primaries are red, yellow and blue. In that model, no combination of other colors gives you blue.

Printers and many modern painters use a slightly different set of primaries: cyan, magenta and yellow (CMY). In that model:

So if you have cyan and magenta paint or ink, you can make blue. With red and yellow alone, you can't.

On screens, blue is one of the three primary colors of light (red, green and blue), so it's never mixed there either.

How to mix shades of blue

Start with any blue you have, then:

A better navy blue

Adding black can make navy look flat or grayish. Try adding a small amount of orange or brown, blue's complementary direction. They darken blue while keeping it rich. Add tiny amounts; too much will turn it brown.

Blue with crayons, markers and colored pencils

• Colored pencils: for light blues, use light pressure instead of white on top. For navy, layer blue and then a light layer of dark brown or black.
• Crayons: color the blue lightly for sky colors, firmly for deep blue. Layer a little purple underneath for royal blue.
• Markers: layer a light blue under a darker blue for smooth skies and water.

More layering tips are in how to color with colored pencils.

Blue on the color wheel

Blue sits opposite orange on the traditional color wheel. Mixing blue and orange makes brown, and putting them side by side makes both look brighter. Blue mixed with yellow makes green, and blue mixed with red makes purple.

Try it

Blue is the color of oceans and skies. Try a page from our shark coloring pages and mix three blues: a light sky blue near the surface, a medium blue in the middle and a deep navy at the bottom. Our summer coloring pages have plenty of sky and pool scenes too.