Welcome to
The Painting Lesson
by Linda Carson
big black pig studio
98 King St. N., Waterloo Ontario Canada
www.bigblackpig.com
Warm Colours
When you're in elementary school, we teach you that the warm colours are the ones around red on the colour wheel: reds, yellows, and oranges. The cool colours are the ones around blue on the colour wheel: blues, greens, and purples. And that's just fine for elementary school.
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For example: The painting above uses the colours we conventionally call "warm." |
However, painters talk about colour temperature in more subtle ways. First and foremost, when we say that a colour is warm or cool, we usually mean relative to some other colour. For instance, banana-peel yellow is warmer than lemon-peel yellow. Candy-apple red is warmer than wine red. So there are warmer and cooler reds, yellows and oranges. It's all relative.
Why does it matter? It matters 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). When you're working on a painting and you're having trouble getting the red caboose to really stand out, maybe you need to change to a warmer red (something a little more orangey than burgundy).
Back to the main lesson?Art & Text (C) Linda Carson 2002
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