"Paintings With Personality"

When Honey and I lived in Japan, I earned a teaching degree in Ikebana. After returning stateside, I taught Ikebana for a few years. I wanted something to paint so I went for a little drive, and tromped through some weeds to cut these branches which I brought back home to paint. I quickly put them in the vase trying (not too successfully) for an Ikebana composition. 

“The effect of brilliancy is to be obtained principally from the oppositions of cool colors with warm colors, and the oppositions of grave colors with bright colors. If all the colors are bright there is no brightness.” – Robert Henri

Hue, intensity, temperature and value are attributes of color. They all need to work together for a painting to have balance and unity. The specific attribute for today’s discussion is color temperature. A thorough knowledge of color temperature and the ability to control it is important to the visual artist. To get that knowledge takes looking, seeing and practicing every day.

When artists speak of color temperature they are talking about how the color feels rather than the actual temperature. Generally blue, green and purple are considered cool colors because they make us think of things that are cool, like water, or the sky. Yellow, orange and red are considered to be warm because they make us think of warm things like fire, or the sun. Temperature can define a specific color or hue, or it can define a relative color. Relative color is two similar examples of the same hue, but one is warmer or cooler than the other, relative color is usually created by adding white or a medium.

Artists have greater success in mixing their paint when they know the color temperature, but determining the warm or cool of a pigment can be difficult. For one thing, the temperature is based on how it makes us feel, and another is because a color is often dependent on the color next to it for the temperature; a cool color next to a cooler color can feel  warm.

Paying attention to the temperature of a color makes a big difference in the aerial perspective of our paintings. Using warm colors in the foreground of a painting and cool colors in the background helps to depict a feeling of space. This happens because warm colors seem to come forward and become larger, while cool colors retreat and compress. Even that is relative because the other aspects of color: intensity, value and hue, affect aerial perspective as well.

Most of the pigments we buy are not pure colors, they are usually warm or cool and therefore biased toward another color. A color wheel can help the artist in determining the temperature of a pigment. Color wheels are split down the middle, warm on one side and cool on the other and showing the warm and cool of all colors included on the wheel. When we use a warm tube blue and a tube of either warm or cool red to get purple, we may not get what we had expected, because we actually mixed the three primaries which can look dirty. This happened because the warm blue had to contain a touch of yellow in order to be warm so that gives us a combination of blue and yellow mixed with red.  If that mixture portrays the mood we are looking for, great. If not, then we have to choose a cool red and a cool blue to get a pure, clear purple. The explanation, a cool blue will lean toward red and a cool red will lean toward blue, so all we have used are two primaries, blue and red. To mix orange, we would need a cool yellow and a warm red, giving us two primaries, yellow and red. Green takes a cool yellow and a warm blue. When setting up our palettes the best bet would be a warm and cool of each primary color plus black and white. We can add as many other tube colors as we want, as long as we know the temperature and value of the new color.

Come back Monday for more on the color attributes. Please comment below, I would like to hear from you.