Welcome to
The Painting Lesson
by Linda Carson
big black pig studio
98 King St. N., Waterloo Ontario Canada
www.bigblackpig.com
Cool Colours
When you're in elementary school, we teach you that the cool colours are the ones around blue on the colour wheel: blues, greens, and purples. The warm colours are the ones around red on the colour wheel: reds, yellows, and oranges. Sound familiar? Well, you're not in elementary school anymore.
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For example: This fingerpainting (above) uses the colours we conventionally call "cool." |
Painters talk about colour temperature in more subtle ways. When we say that a colour is warm or cool, we usually mean relative to some other colour. For instance, sky blue is cooler than blueberry blue. Grass green is cooler than olive green. So there are cooler and warmer blues, greens, and purples. It's all relative.
Why should you care? Because, to the human eye, cool colours appear to subtly recede (or move back deeper into space) and warm colours appear to subtly advance (or pop out at us). If you want that distant mountain range to stay in the background where it belongs, use cooler (bluish) greens and browns for its trees.
Back to the main lesson?Art & Text (C) Linda Carson 2002
Loosely translated, that means:
"Please don't copy this material or redistribute it
in some other form, for any reason.
This is my livelihood."