Hello again! This short post is about the most confusing (in my opinion) part of basic art, the ROY G. BIV mnemonic.

Everyone, or at least most English-speaking people, has been acquainted with the mnemonic ROY G. BIV, as a fictional person’s name, to remember the order of colors in the rainbow. These are Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet (or Purple). So why doesn’t Indigo belong?

To start, let’s look at the three “typical” primary colors: Red, Yellow, and Blue. (Computers use Green instead of Yellow, but that’s a separate matter.)

We have RY B as our mnemonic right now. But there’s obviously something missing!

Per the rules of art, by combining two of these primary colors we get the “secondary” colors.

Notice something? It’s our original mnemonic, but we’re omitting the I for Indigo. These are the primary and secondary colors. When you mix two adjacent colors from this selection together, you’ll get a tertiary color, and it so happens that Indigo is a tertiary color. Well then, what tertiary colors are there?

• Red-orange, orange-yellow, lime, teal, Indigo (the evil one), and magenta are the names I used for the tertiary colors.

As you can probably tell, including all of the tertiary colors is a bad idea. Therefore, scoring points for consistency by using all of a certain type of color, we should only include ROYGBV in our mnemonic.

I’ll leave it up to you if we get an acronym from that that actually forms a sentence. (Spanish gets you RNAVAV, so there’s a challenge…)

Anyway, you might not have learned anything, but I hope you did! That (plus the fact that Picasso’s first word was “piz”, short for lapiz or pencil) finishes today’s article! Goodbye!