Color Charge Quarks and gluons are color-charged particles. When two quarks are close to one another, they exchange gluons and create a very strong color force field that binds the quarks together. The force field gets stronger as the quarks get further apart.
Quarks constantly change their color charges as they exchange gluons with other quarks.
Each quark has one of the three color charges and each antiquark has one of the three anticolor charges. Gluons can be thought of as carrying a color and an anticolor charge since they always change a given color into some anticolor. Since there are nine possible color-anticolor combinations we might expect nine different gluon charges, but the mathematics works out such that there are only eight combinations. Unfortunately, there is no intuitive explanation for this result.