> > PRIMARIES: Red, Blue, Yellow > SECONDARIES: Violet, Green, Orange > TERTIARIES: Red-Violet, Red-Orange, Orange-Yellow, Yellow-Green, > Blue-Green, > Blue-Violet > > You will notice that purple is not among these colours. Also, fanciful > names are missing, as they are too subjective. If one was to place > these > colour in a wheel, one would recognise the constituents of the > prismatic > rainbow. This is what I was taught growing up as a kid. (Although I didn't know the terms 'secondaries' and 'tertiaries' when I was a kid!) However, at least for me where I grew up (California and Texas), 'violet' and 'purple' were basically synonyms. Grown-ups never distinguished between to the two when speaking to me. 'Purple' tended to be used more by us kids and 'violet' sounded more formal and "adult". And I learned all about mixing blue and yellow to make green, blue and red to make purple/violet, and red and yellow to make orange. But if you look at the outer curve of the CIE color space diagram, a triangle with points at red, yellow, and blue encloses less of the colors than a triangle with points at magenta, yellow, and cyan (especially since subtractive, i.e., reflective color pigments are never as intense as colored light and therefore always form a smaller triangle overall). I think that due to two things, 1) the non-natural-ness of cyan and magenta in historical human color terminology, and 2) the resemblance of cyan as a shade of blue and magenta as a kind of overly intense pink/red, these two colors were just lumped in with blue and red. And therefore you ended up with red, yellow, and blue being the pigment primary colors. (Plus, I think sources for cyan and magenta pigments to make paints of those colors was very hard to come by in nature before the modern era of synthesizing compounds and synthetics. There are not too many teal and magenta rocks, minerals, animal products or plant items.) However, you can get a much wider gamut or range of many different colors if you actually use magenta, yellow, and cyan/teal as your pigment primaries. And that's why virtually every color printer I've ever heard of, inkjet, laser, or other, uses those three colors. (As well as modern color printing processes which all seem to use the CMYK colors as their bases.) If you use a color laser printer very much, then you'll have had a lot of experience with the cyan and magenta toner cartridges (as well as the yellow and black toner cartridges) letting loose some of the toner and getting the brilliant cyan and magenta toner dust all over things from time to time. Using the CMYK primaries, you get: PRIMARIES: Magenta, Yellow, Cyan SECONDARIES: Red, Green, Blue TERTIARIES: Magenta-Red (rose red), Red-Yellow (orange), Yellow-Green (chartreuse), Green-Cyan (aqua), Cyan-Blue (turquoise), Magenta-Blue (purple/violet) --Lee Poulsen Pasadena area, California, USDA Zone 9-10On Sep 25, 2004, at 2:39 AM, Jamie wrote: