When I was a beginner, I spent a lot of time doing warm and cool studies. I thought warm and cool was a thing, and it had to be understood.
But I really struggled with it. The studies I produced didn’t look very realistic. I had an incredibly difficult time judging whether colours I saw were warm or cool, particularly very low chroma ones – i.e. very close to grey.
In fact, when it comes down to it, I don’t think the concept of warm and cool helped me at all.
The problem
A purple is warm compared to a blue, but cool compared to an orange. Is a yellow-green warm, or is it cool? And even if you knew, how would that help you paint?
Well, it wouldn’t.
The problem, to me, is that the concept of colour temperature is just too vague to be truly useful. Certainly, when there’s a more reliable and effective alternative, I can’t see a good reason to persist with the concept of warm and cool – especially when it’s so troubling for so many people.
Where it comes from
But I do think the concept of colour temperature does have some basis in what we perceive. In an interior, if you have indirect (north) light, the light will have a slightly blue hue, because it’s reflected off the sky.
In comparison, the ambient light in the room will be reflected off many different surfaces – wood, fabrics, many of which will have a hue more on the red/yellow/orange side of the hue wheel. Warm, if you like.
So, perceptually speaking, shadow colours will quite often appear warmer than the blue-hued lights.
But go outside, and if there’s sunlight the situation is reversed. Which is why you often see purple-blue shadows in paintings influenced by the impressionists. The shadows do appear cooler compared to the warm light of the sun. Although actually, they’re not blue. Don’t get me started.
The alternative
In fact, I don’t see the need to talk about colour temperature at all. Because temperature is just a much less exact way to describe hue.
Hue, that’s the alternative.
Think of it like this. If I have some warm reflected light coming into the shadow of a blue object, that shadow will likely appear warmer.
But purple is warmer than blue. So is green. So which direction should I be travelling around the hue wheel to get that colour right?
Saying the shadow is warmer is just too vague to be useful to anyone, particularly to someone who’s learning and find colour confusing enough as it is.
But if you can tell me the direction around the hue wheel that the hue is shifting – towards red or towards yellow, well then, I have something I can go on.
In fact, I tackled that very problem in a live webinar last night and here’s the spoiler: Orange reflected light in the shadow side of a blue object created a magenta.
I can get even more specific if you like. It was 5RP.
And actually, it makes sense, because as someone pointed out in the webinar, magenta is about mid way between blue and orange – at east, it is on the Munsell hue wheel.
I chose warm and cool as a topic for a webinar because when I asked my regular webinar attendees what they struggled with most in regard to colour, what they’d most like to see a webinar on, the most common answer was warm and cool.
People are honestly confused by the concept and I’m not a bit surprised.
So in this webinar, I’m demonstrating that thinking differently about colour – thinking about hue instead of temperature – can actually make painting the right colours a little easier.
And we all need a bit of that, right? Here’s the webinar:
Best wishes, and thanks for reading (and watching),
Paul
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I watched several of your videos and I have come away with a better understanding of color value. I am starting a color value set of my own color strips of the paints I will be using for my first composition. I will be painting plein aire..more so, as I am a goat farmer. To go inside and paint will be different. I am a newcomer to painting and don’t know where to start. I do feel that color values will be different. If I paint one set inside and one set outside, do you think that will work to be able to paint outside inside? Do you recommend reading material?
I thank you for your time and wanted you to know this. I have you and yours in my prayers.
Virginia R Parker
Hi Virginia. I’m very glad to hear that you found this useful. Certainly, there are differences between painting inside and outside, and colour behaves differently since the light is different. But there are also a lot of skills to do with colour – mixing, judging colour accurately, understanding of the gamut of pant and how to navigate colour space – that are common to both.
A lot of what you learn painting practice studies indoors will translate directly to painting outside too.
Right on Paul and thank you for the great webinar. It definitely made understanding color easier. Also your followup here is great.
Understanding color and knowing color is like searching for the holy grail or to reach Nirvana, a very daunting task. Well, that is how I feel, but I am not going to give up.
thanks Helga 🙂
I enjoyed this webinar very much. Thank you!
You’re very welcome, Gaye 🙂
Hi Paul, I’m a great fan of yours. I’m the founder (20 years ago!!) and Studio Director of the Angel Academy of Art, Florence, and I believe that it is crucial for the new generations of representational painters to cut through the vacuous verbiage of the 20th-century non-representational painters and critics. From our point of view, they literally don’t know what they’re talking about.
As to warm-&-cool, it really is warmer-&-cooler, as you stated at the beginning. Some relatively warm & cool colours in any object—a nude, a tabletop, a summer tree—is beautiful, but what constitutes “balance” changes from painting to painting and mood to mood.
I am a great believer in artistic systems when we are talking about the CONSTRUCTION of a painting (don’t mix two systems, or you’ll have a real mess), but theoretical colour systems can be misleading. The colour wheels (there are six or seven different ones) are a mental construct; they do not exist in nature. They do, however, help us to think about colour in the abstract and plan a harmony. First comes the value scheme (and, surprisingly, there are only about ten or twelve of them in all the millions of paintings ever painted), and this is followed by the hue scheme. Holbein used a complementary-hue scheme almost entirely—red-orange & greenish blue. Rembrandt usually used an analogous-hue scheme: yellow-orange through red.
This is my subject, and I could drone on for hours, but I shan’t. It’s all very straightforward once one stops reading the pundits.
Congratulations again. Complimenti davvero!!
Hi Michael, great to hear from you, and thanks for taking the time to comment!
I actually had an interesting discussion with Anthony Waichulis and David Briggs on facebook about this, sparked by this post. Anthony argued that warm and cool can still be a useful concept to use in teaching, when it makes sense to the student and helps them progress. It’s a very good point and one that it’s impossible to argue with 🙂
And actually, I’d be very happy to hear you “drone” on about colour schemes and design! Of course I was talking here just about colour accuracy and what we perceive, and what you’re describing is much more advanced I think – and more challenging to teach I think, too. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. You can always reach me at paul – at – learning-to-see.co.uk
Hello Paul! I’m very happy to have stumbled upon your blog, because I’ve painted for much of my (admittedly somewhat short, so far) life and so reading about the subject is very interesting to me.
This post really offered an insight into a different mindset about color, which was refreshing to experience. It had never before occurred to me to examine the theory or mindset behind the words used to describe color.
One interesting factoid your post reminded me of was the existence of women known as “tetrochromats,” who can see more colors than the rest of humanity can. It’s fascinating to think that some confusions or even arguments over color could be due to real scientific differences in the way people perceive those colors.
If you’re curious about the subject at all, here’s an article on tetrochromats: http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with-super-human-vision.
That is amazing! I knew that women generally see wider a colour gamut than men (another of the many reasons that women make better artists, despite being so underrepresented in art history) but I didn’t know about tetrochromats.
Thank you!
By the way your website is excellent, but I couldn’t find your “golden mean” post – and I really wanted to read it!
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the webinar. It was really great. I am so glad to learn about “bracketing!”
You’re very welcome Rebecca 🙂
As a watercolor dabbler, I’ve become inclined to say that warm-cool isn’t a key to understanding; but that the knowledge of a color’s color-bias is more useful to understanding saturation (or chroma) of watercolors on the white page. Similar biases produce high saturations of pure color; blue-baised Yellow and yellow-biased Blue for a “clean” Green. Versus a red-biased Yellow and a red-biased Blue for desaturated Green that contains elements of all three “primaries”.