NES Art (503) Practice Test

Pigment primaries are red, yellow, and blue. They’re the colors you start with when mixing paints because, in subtractive color mixing, you can combine them to create many other hues. When you mix pigments, each one subtracts certain wavelengths of light, so adding more pigments generally makes the result darker. From red and yellow you get orange; yellow and blue give green; red and blue yield purple. You can’t obtain red, yellow, or blue by mixing other pigments, which is why they’re called primaries.

The other options aren’t used as the basic pigment trio: cyan, magenta, yellow are the primaries used in color printing (a slightly different subtractive system), red/green/blue includes a secondary color (green), and blue/yellow/purple uses a secondary color (purple) instead of a true pigment primary. So the traditional pigment primaries are red, yellow, and blue.