Home Color Guides What Colors Make Blue
Blue is one of the three paint primaries, which means no combination of other colors lands on it — every "recipe" you have seen produces a muted indigo or a gray. Below is the arithmetic to prove it, computed swatch by swatch, and the shade-and-tint routes that actually work when you need navy or sky blue.
#0000ff Ratio 1 : 1 · 50 / 50
Blend path between your colors
color-mix(in oklab, #800080 50%, #008000) Pigments work by absorbing light. A primary blue reflects the band your eye reads as blue and absorbs most of the rest — there is no pair of pigments whose leftovers add up to that. Mixing purple and green, the most-recommended recipe, gives you a gray-violet mud, because between them they absorb almost everything and leave a dim, colorless remainder.
Screens are the opposite case: they add light, and blue is a primary of light too. So whether you mix paint or mix light, blue is something you start with. What mixing CAN do is move an existing blue — darken it to navy, lift it to sky — and that is the practical half of this page.
Every result below is computed in a perceptual color space: the swatch is the blend your eye sees, with the HEX code next to it. Click any code to copy it.
The combo most sites recommend — computed honestly, it lands on gray-violet.
Each pigment cancels what the other reflects. The swatch above is the real landing spot — a muted mauve-gray, nowhere near blue. This is the proof, not a recipe.
Darkening purple drifts into indigo — the nearest any mix gets to blue.
This reads as a midnight blue-violet — respectable for deep shadow colors, but hold it next to true blue and the purple bias shows immediately.
Start from real blue and darken it — how navy is actually made.
This is the honest answer for "what colors make navy": blue, plus black in small passes. The full ratio table lives on the blue and black page.
None. Blue is a primary in both paint and light, so no pair of other colors mixes to it — the popular purple-and-green recipe computes to a gray-violet, as the swatches above show. Start from a blue pigment and adjust from there.
Blue plus a small amount of black. Add the black in tiny passes — a quarter as much by feel already reads navy, and a little more takes you to midnight. See the blue and black page for the full ratio walk.
Blue plus white. Small amounts of white lift blue to sky and powder tones quickly, so add white gradually. A whisper of green takes sky blue toward the turquoise family.
Frosting is a dosing problem: start from white buttercream and add blue gel one drop at a time. Two drops read pastel, four to five read a medium blue — the buttercream color chart lists exact drop counts per shade.