What Color Does Green and Blue Make?

It’s time for another addition to our color mixing chart experiments! This time we will be investigating the question: what color does green and blue make when the two are combined?

As background, I’m a teacher and artist who has delighted in discovering what happens when you swirl together different beautiful paint pigments. Some of the combinations have been mighty surprising — especially the answer to “What does purple and green make?” Today’s illustrations will show still more surprises.

Blue and Green Make…

Blue is a primary color (along with red and yellow). Green is a secondary color (a mix of two primary colors — in this case, blue and yellow). When you mix a primary and secondary color you get what’s called a tertiary color.

When they are formed from analogous colors, two hues right next to each other on a color wheel, a bright and pleasing hue results: intermediate colors. The tertiary color created by combining green and blue is… teal — a gorgeous and calming blue-green!

Love intermediate colors? Check out my recent post on how to make magenta: the result of mixing the primary color, red, with the secondary color, purple, and my exploration on how to make chartreuse: yellow plus green. Oh, and let’s not forget the other tertiary friends, vermillion color: the result of red plus orange, and how to make violet: blue plus purple.

How to Make Teal

Now, there are so many different types of blue and green, and each has a variety of shades (amounts of white or black added). This means that the type of teal you get when you mix green with blue varies widely, depending on the “ingredient” hues you choose, and the ratio of each.

See my illustration above to see what I mean. In the top row, I’ve mixed very light-colored blues and greens, and the resulting teal is the color of a Caribbean sea — almost azure. In contrast, the teal at the bottom is made from darker ingredient colors, and results in an almost emerald green hue.

So, What Color Does Green and Blue Make?

You can now sing it from the rooftops: the answer to “What do blue and green make?” is TEAL: a luscious blue-green. Unlike the muddy results when complimentary (opposite) colors are combined — as happens with mixing red and green, orange and blue, or yellow and purple — tertiary colors like teal are bright and happy. Enjoy using teal for all your fashion and art needs!