The next exploration in our color mixing chart adventures is one of my all-time favorite combinations. It’s the answer to the question, “What do blue and purple make when the colors are mixed together?”
As background, I’m an artist and teacher, and I do hands-on illustrations in these tutorials to help explain what happens when paint hues are mixed — such as figuring out what red and green make. Here’s my first drawing from our purple plus blue experiment, showing the beauty that results from just swirling together the two pigments…
Teal and purple are both secondary colors, which means they are created by mixing two primary colors. Teal is created by mixing blue and green, while purple is created by mixing red and blue. When you mix teal and purple together, the resulting color will be a dark, muted shade of blue.
What Does Purple and Blue Make?
Unlike the answer to the question, “What do blue and red make?” which pretty much has just one answer (purple), the correct response to what blue and purple make is a more complicated one. Why is that?
Well, the former color combination of the two listed above is a mix of two primary colors (red and blue), which yields a secondary color (purple). The latter combo, however, is an example of tertiary or intermediate colors made from mixing a primary color (in this case, blue) with a secondary color (purple). This tends to introduce more variations of results, as the “ingredient colors can vary.
Another complication is that sometimes the secondary color I’m calling purple is labeled “violet” on certain color wheels. But what’s the official answer to the question of blue plus purple?
The technical name for the tertiary color formed by 50% true primary color blue plus 50% true secondary color purple is blue-purple. More commonly, this combination is known as the color violet (sometimes called blue-violet, in versions of color wheels that call the color I’m labeling “purple” here as “violet” instead).
Because blue and purple are next to each other on the color wheel, they are known as “analogous colors,” and thus the resulting intermediate color from their mix is a bright and happy combination right between the two hues. In contrast, orange and purple are complimentary colors — colors that sit across from each other in the color wheel — and thus cancel each other’s brightness out when mixed, forming a muddy brown, gray, or even black.
Periwinkle, Indigo, Lilac, and Lavender
But wait — it’s not just violet that blue and purple produce when mixed, because we all know that the “ingredient” colors are usually not perfectly pure, and the ratios are rarely 50-50. So what are some other resulting colors from this combination? In my illustrations above and below, you can see the range of beautiful blue-purple and blue-violet hues that come from playing with different shades and types of pigments coming together.
Periwinkle is a personal favorite resulting color from the mix: it is a lighter blue with a dash of purple — pictured in the second line from the bottom in my drawing above. The colors lilac and lavender are the same idea in that they’re a lighter color and slightly dusty, but they have more purple, with a dash of blue. Lavender is slightly darker and less dusty than lilac.
Indigo is bold and beautiful: it’s a deep, rich blue-purple, with an emphasis on an almost sapphire blue base. In the world of chakra colors, that hue often associated with the 6th or Third Eye Chakra, and has a spiritual and mystical vibe because of its powerful pigmentation.
If you add a bunch of black into the mix, you can even get a deep, dark shade called midnight purple. (Yes, this is an exciting new variant on the concept of “midnight blue.”)
How to Mix Colors to Get Turquoise
FAQ
What Colour do you get if you mix purple and blue?
Can you wear purple and teal together?
What color do you get if you mix purple and green?
What color is teal & purple?
Purple is made from combining red and blue pigment. Red and blue are considered primary colors. When mixed together in equal parts, they make the secondary color purple. Teal is made from mixing blue and green pigments. It sits between green and blue on the color wheel. So purple contains red and blue, while teal contains green and blue.
Why do purple & teal color mix?
The reason mixing purple and teal creates a dark bluish-purple color is because both original colors contain a strong blue pigment. Blue is the dominant hue in this color mix. The red and green pigments neutralize and deepen each other into a very dark shade. Red pigment is much stronger and darker than green.
How do you mix teal & purple?
Teal represents calmness, while purple signifies creativity. Use a color wheel. Teal and purple are complementary colors. Balance the shades. Experiment with different teal and purple shades for the right mix. Play with saturation. Adjusting saturation levels impacts their appearance. Consider the context.
What color goes well with pink & teal?
Depending on specific shades and proportions, pink and teal mixed together can create shades of purple. The combination of the blue and green tones in teal, along with the lighter shade of red in pink, blends harmoniously to produce this vibrant and visually appealing hue. What colour does blue and purple make?