Before we start combining paint, here’s a little background. My name is Lillie, and I am a teacher and artist who adores doing hands-on pigment mixing experiments, and sharing the results with you — from the simple, “Blue and yellow make what color?” to the more complex, “Red and green make what color?”
The Enchanting Autumn of Qinba: A Long-lasting Delight
In the Qinba region, known for its location in the transitional zone between the north and south of China, autumn takes on a unique and mesmerizing quality. Unlike the fleeting autumn in North China or the lack of distinct seasons in Lingnan, Qinba experiences a prolonged and enchanting autumn that leaves a lasting impression on its residents.
It is during the month of October when Qinba reveals its true beauty. As the autumn rain drizzles over the region, the once emerald green mountains gradually transform into a sea of red. Each layer of forest seems to be dyed in shades of red, creating a stunning visual display. The hillsides and valleys become adorned with red leaves, resembling a fiery ocean, making Bashan Chushui a picturesque destination.
Personally, I have developed a fondness for the red leaves of Qinba. They paint the autumn in vibrant shades of red and leave an indelible mark in one’s heart. From a distance, the red leaves on thousands of trees resemble rolling flames. As a cool autumn wind blows by, these leaves slowly detach from their tree hosts, bidding a reluctant farewell to the mother tree that nourished them, and returning to the earth.
Traveling on the G316 national highway allows visitors to witness the awe-inspiring scenery of “cars traveling in the mountains and people swimming in the paintings.” The vivid colors of the water and the dazzling forest create the most magnificent gallery of red leaves between the towering Qinling Mountains and Bashan Mountain. Among all the red leaves, the fiery red leaves of Cochinabara japonica stand out as particularly dazzling.
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While driving through Qinba is a popular choice, I personally prefer to explore its mountains and forests on foot. The hazy atmosphere gives me a sense of comfort, as if I am wandering in a fairyland. Upon closer inspection, the red leaves reveal a complex background with multiple layers of color. Shades of purple red, pink, orange red, golden red, brown red, and maroon red intermingle with hints of goose yellow and grass green, creating a colorful wonderland.
Walking along the mountain trails, the flowing leaves of sycamore and white birch trees add to the sense of freedom in the air. After the autumn harvest, scarecrows stand tall in the middle of the rice fields, seemingly forgotten amidst the pecking of turtledoves and sparrows on the rice ears. In the distance, clusters of Barmao roots connect with each other and merge harmoniously with the distant mountains.
The mountains of Qinba are not only rich in scenic beauty but also abundant in fruits. Every autumn, the mountains and ridges become adorned with bright yellow jujubes, sweet sorghum stalks, and fiery red persimmons. These plentiful resources have led to a local tradition of making wine in many villages. When one walks into the small village of Shan’aozi, the aroma of wine fills the air as smoke rises from the earth stove at the end of each courtyard.
“Autumn has been a sad and lonely time since ancient times,” as the saying goes. In autumn, a sense of melancholy often pervades our hearts. Southern Shaanxi’s autumn is accompanied by cold rain and the rustling of the autumn wind. Watching the falling leaves, our hearts become increasingly somber, often evoking memories of lost things. Standing amidst the mountains of Qinba, one gradually grasps the meaning of life as nature unfolds, entering a spiritual realm that is both hazy and indescribable. It is only natural to feel a sense of sadness and reflection.
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As autumn passes, it reminds us that youth is also ephemeral. Just like the climate of Qinba, life consists of four seasons. As we enter late autumn, having been nourished by spring and seasoned by summer, we grow calmer and more mature, preparing ourselves to embrace the arrival of the harsh winter.
In the Qinba region, autumn is not just a fleeting season, but a transformative and enduring experience. Its breathtaking landscapes, vibrant red leaves, and bountiful fruits make it truly a season to remember. So, why not take a journey to Qinba and immerse yourself in the beauty of its autumn?
Mixing Purple
Before we address what purple and brown make, let’s back up and review some previous, related purple-mixing experiments. This will help us make an educated guess about what will happen next. First, we know that purple and yellow make the color mauve (a dusty, brown-purple) or brown.
Next, we know that the answer to “What color do purple and orange make?” ranges from brown, to russet (red-brown), to brownish-pink. Finally, we know that red and purple make the color magenta: a vibrant reddish purple. From this, I’m starting to deduce that brown plus purple will produce some sort of brownish, purplish pink. But first, let’s back up even further and do some color math.
What Makes Brown and Purple?
We know already that the secondary color, Purple = Red + Blue. We also know that the answer to what colors make brown (in the RYB color model) is all three primary colors mushed together: Red, Yellow, and Blue. Therefore, the equation becomes: Purple + Brown = Red + Blue + Red + Blue + Yellow = Purple + Purple + Yellow.
Interesting! From this, we suddenly realize that the overwhelming thrust of this mix will actually be purple! Just with a little yellow mixed in to make it slighly more brownish and dark. (We had a similar revelation in our “Brown and green make what color?” experiment.) Let’s now at last turn to my paints to see if this theory holds water. Behold my illustration below…
How to Make Plum Color
Wow! It turns out that when you mix together purple and brown, you get the deep, slightly brownish shade of purple called plum! I’m so excited and surprised by this — I really expected much more of a brown result. Instead, here is a luscious fruit tone! (Just like our “What color do pink and yellow make?” discussion, this result makes me hungry.)
Note that while plum is similar to maroon color made by what red and black make, it has far more blue in it. It’s probably closest to what purple and black make — a rich, deep shade called midnight purple — but it’s more dusty and neutral because of the addition of the yellow from the brown.
In my drawing below, I’m playing around more with this mix, layering markers and then swirling them together in spots with an airbrush to desaturate them a bit and make the resulting shade easier to see. In this latter illustration, you can see that purple plus brown can also yield a very dark, almost black color, as well as a browner or blacker purple, and a dusty dark mauve. It just depends what your input colors and ratios are.
Purple and Brown Make What Color?
Color me shocked: It turns out that the correct response to: “Purple and brown make what color? is… plum! I never realized that how to make a plum color involved brown. Yum! See my experiment about what red and brown make for a musical twist on this theme.
Naturally, this mix can also produce more brownish, grayish, blackish purples, depending on ratio inputs, but overall, the color math of Red + Blue + Red + Blue + Yellow yields a far more purple result than anything else. What else would you like me to illustrate and explain? Do share!
Want more? Check out the weird double definition of tertiary colors, and the answer to the question, “Brown and yellow make what color?”
The author and artist, Lillie Marshall, is a National Board Certified Teacher of English who has been a public school educator since 2003, and an experienced Reiki practitioner since 2018. All art on this site is original and hand-drawn by Lillie. She launched DrawingsOf.com Educational Cartoons in 2020, building upon the success of her other sites, AroundTheWorldL.com (established 2009), TeachingTraveling.com (founded 2010), and ReikiColors.com. Subscribe to Lillie’s monthly newsletter, and follow @WorldLillie on social media to stay connected!
Brown and purple color intermingling
Yup, same in Korean. You’ll hear lots of adults say the blue grass or blue light (for traffic signals).
For English speakers, do you think that you have a limitation in your ability to see and distinguish variations of blue because you have a single word, “blue” that covers a range of colors?
In Russian there are two colors for blue, “goluboy” and “siniy”. “goluboy” if for lighter blues, and “siniy” is for darker blues.
Does this mean that Russians are more attuned to difference in the concept of blue or just that they have discrete names that are more convenient when talking about some kinds of blue?
Research shows that the way your native language divides colors does affect your ability to distinguish them. For example, a Russian speaker would more quickly and easily distinguish two similar shades if one is goluboy and one is siniy. However, with training, anyone with adequate color vision can learn to be as or more proficient.
I’d argue that demonstrates that practicing distinguishing colors is learned. Some people practice distinguishing colors because their culture tends to to so, such as people who speak Russian. For others, they learn to do it by practicing visual design. Other people just pick it up over time. I mean, after all English has words for “teal” and “turquoise”. So it’s just a subjective matter of what’s common.
This isn’t evidence, for example, that language determines or enhances your ability to distinguish color.
> This isn’t evidence, for example, that language determines or enhances your ability to distinguish color.
Right, language just determines which colors you learn to distinguish early in life. And it’s a pretty small effect size IIRC.
I don’t experience an internal monologue and don’t think of any words at all when looking at colors, yet I have a very good ability to differentiate between subtle hue variants (based on tests I have taken that test exactly this).
If it’s true that language affects ability to differentiate hues (I am somewhat skeptical, but certainly open to the possibility), then it seems to me that maybe language just muddies our natural ability. In other words, thinking about the word “blue” might cause you to artificially group colors together that you wouldn’t otherwise group.
I don’t think 99%+ of people “think of words when looking at colors” unless they have some reason to.
I want to be clear, it’s a small difference in initial ability to distinguish certain colors. If you’ve spent your whole life dividing colors a certain way, it’s a little easier for you to distinguish colors that are on different sides of that boundary.
Maybe it’s less about ability to distinguish, and more about. readiness to do so? I’m not sure how to phrase it.
Nah, those words are more like synonyms than two different colors / groups of colors. They aren’t used consistently neither by the same group of people nor between different groups.
This is especially obvious when there’s a need to give a precise name / definition (eg. when naming paints or objects with very distinctive color). For example, I’ve heard cyan translated as either one of those (I studied printing). And when it comes to paints, there’s eg. “берлинская лазурь” (the name of a particular pigment and a paint that uses that pigment), which is typically described as голубая, but it’s really dark.
In general, it seems that in languages with long history, there’s very little in terms of consistency in how speakers name different colors. Meanings “drift” over time. Sometimes they “fork” because of the objects associated with the same color change that color (eg. egg yolk yellow). It’s also influenced by availability of pigments and dyes and the companies who manufacture paints. Sometimes these keep labeling, but change the technology used to make paints. In particular, saturation seems to increase with technological advances, but names seems to remain the same.
This, of course, also depends on your audience. If you talk to an arts student or a painter, they will have a different idea about what colors are and how to name them. For instance, an art student would often deny that “white”, “black”, “brown” or “pink” designate colors — from a perspective of someone trained in classical painting, these aren’t really colors and don’t help in describing what / how one should draw something. Similarly, from a perspective of someone who’s tasked with painting walls, the division may be imposed by technical limitations (i.e. mixing paints from a particular manufacturer cannot produce a desired hue, if, eg. green paint is used, therefore the painter may believe that the color isn’t a shade of green).
Maybe, although we use extra adjectives like Royal blue, sky blue, powder blue, navy blue, etc
That may get the color differentiation down well enough for regular people to use. Maybe not for blue experts though.
No, in English there are many, many words for blue, some of which are only known by women and interior designers.
In english the amount of precision you use depends on the context and the shared referents. You could say “bud light blue” or ‘greek blue’ depending.
No. You can still see.
I used to spend time in a chat room where you could configure the background and foreground color of your text; I used blue on cyan.
You can still see it, but you pay less attention to it, in some cases if the color has no meaning to you, then it you become attention blind to it.
I used to not pay any attention to colors, but I heard men have high rates of color blindness, and I also heard about tetrachromats.
I took a bunch of tests, I’m not color blind, nor am I a tetrachromat, but after those tests I take my color vision more seriously and try to distinguish more colors.
There’s definitely a difference between “baby blue” and “navy blue.”
Have to mention the related post from 2012 that made me fall in love with HN:
I think that the main point the article tries to make isn’t specific to colors. It’s about language influencing how our minds process “raw” information.
And, to anyone who speaks more than one language well this is nothing new. Sometimes we don’t have a “good” translation for a concept in one language, but because it’s accessible to us in another language, we’d invent a way to adapt that concept using the lacking language. This is especially common when translating from a “bigger” language into a smaller one.
For example, early modern Hebrew speakers loaned a lot of concepts from Russian (beside other languages), but because Russian and Hebrew are very different, they had to put some serious effort into adaptation. Ukrainian language underwent a process where a lot of terminology had to be invented or translated from other languages because for years it wasn’t used in academia or industry.
Computer-related jargon is full of instances where concepts were borrowed from English but had to be adapted to the loaning language. In Hebrew, it’s a subject of many jokes, because early attempts at adaptation tried to rely on Hebrew roots instead of borrowing words / concepts phonetically, but now very few people know what was meant by that (eg. “tsag” — the early version of translation of “monitor”).
I have wondered with colour words if the increasing prevalence of computers and their related vocabulary is influencing English speakers use of colour words.
For instance, as mentioned in the article English speakers have historically divided the range of colours into: Black, White, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple, Brown, Orange and Grey. South American Spanish, along with Italian and Russian add a distinction between light-blue and dark-blue (maybe like the distinction between Red and Pink).
In computers the most natural set of colours is more like: Black, White, Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. Has this influenced English speakers to draw incorporate new colour terms into their common vocabulary – Magenta ‘feels’ too close to pink to be a new colour for me, but Cyan (or equivalently Turquoise or Azure) feels different enough to be a new and distinct colour.
In France purple is not in the set. We have blue, white, red (obviously), black, yellow, green, gray. No orange, no purple, no brown – we of course know these colors but we would not use them when “dividing” colors into sets.
I’m not sure what distinction you are making between marron (brown), violet, and orange in French from other basic colors. Can you clarify this?
OP mentioned that English speakers have historically divided the range of colours into: Black, White, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple, Brown, Orange and Grey.
When we think about “basic colors”, we would not add purple, brown or orange to the set. Grey neither know that I think of it.
What color is the soil?
The color of the soil. All of the languages with a paucity of dedicated color words can readily describe colors by reference. Orange, pink, and violet are not actual color words either. They’ve been imported to perform dual duty from their original meaning because they were used frequently enough to describe the color of oranges, pinks, and violets.
What are pinks and violets? I didn’t even know those were objects. And I think I learned the color orange before I knew what an orange was?
Definitely not intuitive unless you already know what they are, but in this case refers to taxanomic naming of some plant families.
>Caryophyllaceae, commonly called the pink family or carnation family
>Violaceae is a family of flowering plants … It takes its name from the genus Viola, the violets and pansies.
violets are objects, they’re a type of flower. not sure about pink though
edit: pink is also a type of flower
Not sure what you mean. Probably brown, why?
I just mean that if brown isn’t a common color word there, what do school children etc use to describe that color?
Here in the US, “brown” is difference enough from the other colors that I would struggle to find another word for it. “Dark orange” seems really strange, or “yellowish red” is weird too.
OP mentioned that English speakers have historically divided the range of colours into: Black, White, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple, Brown, Orange and Grey.
I read it as some kind of spectrum or “main colors” – it does not list all known colors but a set where the others would more or less fit in. This is also not the visual spectrum because gray or black are not there.
For us in France, this spectrum would list the colors I mentioned and it would be good enough to characterize what colors we have. Brown, pink, orange, . are not part of them, like gold or silver is not either, or salmon or azur.
This is of course a limiting set and we use on an everyday basis “brown”, as much as “orange” or “blue”, it is just that it is not, historically or culturally, part of the set of “basic colors”.
Since colors are not a physical concept anyway, there is a lot of space for interpretation so I would not be surprised if other countries have other sets of basic colors.
Ahhh, I get what you’re saying now.
It’s like in the US we divide the rainbow into “ROYGBIV” (red orange yellow green blue indigo violet), which was quite different from how I learned it in grade school in another country. But in both situations there are still a variety of other color names in common usage.*
So it’s the same there. Maybe “brown” (brun?) is common, but it just wouldn’t be used as a broad grouping. Thanks for clarifying.
* After learning the rainbow in one language/culture, we then learned about the spectrum in science class. Only after that did I learn the US divisions, ROYGBIV seemed as arbitrary as any other division. I guess there’s many ways to do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_color#Spectral_color_.
> we then learned about the spectrum in science class
As an ex-PhD in physics, that part always makes me wince. “Color” as a physical concept does not exist, but we still try to say that “blue” is around 400 nm and “red” 700 or so.
In reality “color” is a concept of our mind that is a complicated averaging/interpolation of the brain based on the response of cones in our eye. While the majority of people has more or less the same reaction, it can vary wildly.
This is also the reason why culturally some colours are more or less important.
> Maybe “brown” (brun?) is common
Your comment made me remember a time I was with my children and some of their friends (they were 3 or 4 yo) and they were discussing about colors, including the soil. While “sly” was “blue”, the soil was all kinds of things, including a new color “soily” 🙂
Computers, especially the sRGB colorspace is severely lacking in the green region. There are many colours that humans can sense that have no corresponding RGB value.
It is interesting that Newton eschewed purple for indigo and violet in the rainbow because he wanted it to have seven colors (it actually doesn’t have discrete colors).
It’s not just about different languages. I bet a graphic artist sees distinctions in colors that most people would group together. At the extreme end, Pantone has made a massive business of precisely dividing shades of colors.
[finite_depth says this much better than me in a parallel comment!]
I believe this is explicitly about how ‘regular’ speakers of languages agree on colours, and which are distinct.
For instance ‘lime’ can describe a colour – typically a light green. But most English speakers [citation needed] would consider it to be a shade a green, not a distinct colour.
