Tertiary color if they exist at all, though indigo and scarlet are standard for blue–violet and red–vermilion. In another sense, a tertiary color is obtained by mixing secondary-colored pigments. These three colors are russet (orange–purple), slate (purple–green), and citron (green–orange), with the corresponding three quaternary colors plum (russet–slate), sage (slate–citron), buff (citron–russet) (with olive sometimes used for either slate or citron). Beyond that are shades of grey (blue grey and brown greys), which approach but never quite reach black. The RYB color terminology outlined above and in the color samples shown below is ultimately derived from the 1835 book "Chromatography", an analysis
Secondary color secondary CMY colors (with secondary colors in boldface) are: Ideally, combining three perfect primary colors in equal amounts would produce black, but this is impossible to achieve in practice. Therefore a "key" pigment, usually black, is added to printing to produce dark shades more efficiently. This combination is referred to as CMYK, where K stands for Key. Before the discovery of CMY, at least as far back as Goethe, the best primary colors were thought to be red, yellow, and blue. Mixing these pigments in equal amounts produces orange, green, and purple: That is, the primary and secondary RYB colors