Fundamental particles can be divided into three categories, quarks, leptons and gauge bosons.
Quarks are the constituents of baryons, like protons and neutrons.
Protons and neutrons are not fundamental since they are comprised of other particles. Therefore conservaton of baryon number can be stated as conservation of quark number. The colors are just names and don't refer to real color. It turns out that on length scales greater than 1.0 E-15 m only colorless objects exist in nature. For instance, a proton which is comprised of two up quarks and one down quark must have one quark of each color to remain colorless.