Color There are two systems that are generally used when working with subtractive color. The printing industry uses a system called CMYK in which all of the colors are created by mixing cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks on white paper. Other artists use some variation of the familiar color wheel that uses the three primaries, red, blue, and yellow along with black and white. Painters sometimes use a "split pallet" that includes a warm and a cool of each primary for a total of six. Ostwald and Munsell are two other well-known subtractive color systems.