Dear Letter Drop readers,
This week in my studio, I used several pages of my sketchbook to do color studies, which I haven’t done properly since my art school days. Figuring out colors is the fun part but also the most difficult part, as colors are a crucial element that creates the overall mood of the artwork.
I decided to study color and temperature mostly to remind myself of the basic theory, hoping it would save me some time when choosing the right color palette for projects.
Last year, I attended an online book talk by my favorite artist, Matthew Forsythe, and learned that he focuses on temperature instead of a specific color palette when he creates artwork. First, he picks out one warm color and one cool color, then builds layers of colors, only focusing on pushing and pulling back the values.
To test this out on my own, I first put down two circles of each cold red and blue, then overlayed yellow on one of each. The second and last circles have yellow overlayed and turned into warm orange-red and green.
I prefer a warm color palette to a cool one. Most of the colors I subconsciously pick out are warm yellow, red, and green. However, I had a lot of questions. Does that mean I don’t need any cool colors? How about blue - aren’t most blues cool colors? How about pink?
Colors are often warmer when they have yellows mixed into them and cool when pure blues are mixed into them. However, this is not always the case, as color temperatures are comparative - they depend on what colors are next to each other. Yes, it’s fine to work on a limited color palette just with a few warm colors, but it’s useful to know how warm and cool colors coexist and what they create.
The example above shows how there can be a temperature difference in the same blue hues (not all blues are cool temperatures!). A little bit of yellow added makes the blue more greenish, creating a warm blue. The more pure blue (closer to cobalt) it is, or the closer it is to purple, the more it becomes cool blue.
We can see that warm, green-blue pops out more, meaning it’s the color that comes forward. If you were to paint a blue flower, the front petals could be warm blue, and the petals in the back could have a cool blue.
Making colors darker is not the only way to make the elements seem farther away in the background. You can also play around with color temperature to decide which element to bring forward or recede.
I often struggle to find the right blue when I paint sky and water, so I wanted to test and find out what should be my go-to blue paint depending on the scenes. This part was a tough one! Can you tell how many times I crossed out whether the blue I was using was warm or cool?
When I try to paint a winter scene that feels very cold, I used the blue on the left (Ultramarine), which somehow didn’t feel so cold to me. It felt dark, dull, and warm, but not necessarily only temperature-wise.
I used the blue on the right (Cerulean) to paint the winter sky, and suddenly it felt right. Just like the strong light coming into the sky, the cerulean sky felt fresh, cold, and clear.
There are competing opinions among artists that ultramarine is warm and cerulean is cool, or it’s the opposite. After testing out several different blues this past two weeks, my opinion is that I agree with the former, and also that it depends on the surrounding colors.
Then I played around with various color layering by adding a layer of yellow or blue on top. Even though the same color is overlayed, it can make the first color layer lighter or darker, or more dull or saturated.
Now we can apply this to a new sketch idea! When there is a clear idea about the parts we want to emphasize and the atmosphere we aim to create, choosing colors will be less tricky.
It will be difficult to remember or assume all the color combinations, but testing and understanding color theory will definitely help when choosing colors. The more we know of basic theories and techniques, the more we will be able to express our ideas freely.
Hope you enjoyed reading, and have a wonderful week, everyone!
Sincerely,
Cindy