Third Set of Colors?
I have heard of Primary and Secondary Colors, but is there a Third Set?
I have never heard of an official third set of colors, but there are different sets that are not official such as pastels and the like. They are obviously not the impact base colors of primary and secondary and are indeed created off shoots of the two color sets. Color sets like flourescents and mixture colors technically aren't official color sets either but are still used in things like paints and crayons, so I count them as color sets as well.
Actually, this is interesting because I just barely learned about a third set of colors last week! Every color wheel I have ever seen or created has had the primary colors (Red, yellow, blue) then mix them together and you get the secondary (orange, purple, green) and then the Tertiary, which are the primary and secondary colors mixed together (red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, red-violet).
The other day when I was in the high school class where I am student teaching, my cooperating teacher showed me a book that he has that says that the longest list of colors above that I have labeled as Tertiary are actually the "intermediate" colors, and that the true tertiary colors are just the secondary colors mixed together. Orange+green=citrine, green+purple=olive, purple+orange=russet (I think that is correct, just going off my memory here). Now, I have NEVER heard this before in any art book, or from any artist or art teacher. In a way it makes sense, but the other way makes sense to me too. I think it would be interesting to share this with students, but I don't think it makes sense to focus on these three colors or depart from the color wheel norm, since they will just hit opposition to them in every other class they take.