The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. When looking at the color brown, it can be helpful to think about how it is made up of different primary colors.
The Color Wheel
The traditional color wheel shows the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors and their relationships. Brown is not considered a primary, secondary, or tertiary color on the traditional color wheel. However, brown can be made by mixing the primary colors.
How Brown is Formed
Brown is what is known as a tertiary color. This means that brown is made up of a combination of two primary colors. The specific combination of primaries that make brown are red and green.
Green is a secondary color made from two primary colors – yellow and blue. When green is mixed with red, the resulting color is brown. So while brown contains red, it also contains yellow and blue from the green.
This makes the primary color closest to brown red, since red is the only primary color directly contained in brown. However, brown also contains a good amount of blue and yellow.
Brown Color Mixing
More specifically, the tones of brown depend on the amount of each primary color used:
- Dark browns contain more red
- Reddish browns have more red than yellow
- Golden browns have more yellow than red
- Greenish browns have more blue and yellow
This table shows some examples of shades of brown and the primary color proportions:
| Brown Shade | Red | Yellow | Blue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dark brown | High | Low | Low |
| Reddish brown | High | Medium | Low |
| Golden brown | Medium | High | Low |
| Greenish brown | Low | Medium | High |
As shown, the amount of each primary color present varies depending on the exact shade of brown.
Measuring Color Proximity
There are a few ways to more objectively determine color proximity and measure how close different shades are to one another.
One method is looking at the RGB values. RGB stands for red, green, and blue – the primary colors used for light and digital color mixing. Each color has values from 0-255 for how much red, green, and blue it contains.
For example, a reddish brown might have an RGB value of 165, 42, 42. This means it has a high amount of red, and low amounts of blue and green. A greenish brown, on the other hand, might be 90, 115, 45 – higher in blue and green than red.
The Euclidean distance formula can calculate the distance between two colors using their RGB values. The shorter the calculated distance, the more visually similar the colors are. Using this formula, red would likely have the shortest distance to shades of brown due to its direct presence.
Human Perception of Color
Human perception of color is also relevant when looking at brown’s relationship to the primary colors. While objectively brown contains both red and green primary mixtures, it may subjectively appear closer to red for these reasons:
- Warm vs. cool colors – Red is a warm color while green and blue are cool colors. Brown is considered a warm neutral.
- Visual lightness – Red is darker than yellow and blue. Brown is also a relatively dark color.
- Common associations – Red and brown are associated with nature like earth, wood, and autumn leaves.
Due to these perceptual factors, brown may seem more closely related to red than the other primaries for the human eye.
Answering the Question
So in summary, while brown contains both red and green mixtures, red seems to be the closest primary color to brown both objectively and subjectively due to:
- Red being the only primary directly contained in brown
- Higher red proportions in many shades of brown
- Shorter calculated color distance between red and brown
- Red and brown appearing more perceptually similar
Therefore, the primary color closest to brown is red.
Conclusion
Brown is made from a mixture of the primary colors red and green. However, when analyzing the precise composition of various shades of brown, along with color proximity measurements and human visual perception, red emerges as the single primary color closest to brown overall.
Looking at the color wheel relationships, RGB values, and subjective color similarities all point to red having the strongest association with brown. So while brown is a tertiary blend of primaries, red is the closest primary color match.
