Is That Color Warm or Cold
You hear a lot about the terms warm or cool colors. There is a broad definition and a more detailed explanation for warm and cool colors. The basic definition for your primary colors are red is warm and blue is cold some refer to yellow as warm but I consider it a neutral color meaning it can lean either warm or cool. Next you have your secondary colors Orange is warm and Violet is cool but once again I consider green to be neutral because it can be warm or cool.
General Definition
Warm Colors | Neutral Colors | Cool Colors |
Red | Yellow | Blue |
Orange | Green | Violet |
The more detailed definitions or warm or cool are applied to every color on color wheel and the colors you have on your palette
Warm and Cool of each Primary and Secondary Color
Warm Colors | Cool Colors |
Yellow -Orange Yellows | Yellow- Greener Yellows |
Blue – Green Blues | Blue- Violet Blues |
Red – Red Orange | Red Violet |
Red Orange | Yellow Orange |
Red Violet | Blue Violet |
Yellow Green
|
Blue Green |
This palette contains the warm and cool of every primary color. These are spaced around the color wheel the closer proximity of the colors allows us to get more color variations. Because as we will learn distance between your colors is everything in controlling your color mixtures.
More detailed still is colors are warm and cool in context to one another you can take a cool color from a overall warm painting(with mostly oranges and reds) and put it in an overall cool painting(painting with a a lot of purple and blues) and that color that was cool in one context can be warm in another. Below is a good example.
Put here 6 colors with different relationships.
The Violet Color Seems Warm among blues and greens but cool among yellows and reds
To see videos on Color Theory and Mixing visit my YouTube channel
Here is a video on Warm and Cool colors
This was a brilliant, thank you! I love the way you mix the colors and what one can achieve with the various mixes. I enjoyed your article on what to look for when purchasing paints, and found this to be extremely informative. I wish I had this information before I purchased my paints as I really went to town and probably won’t even use some of them, nonetheless, I have them now and will try to put it to good use in future.
this video was very helpfull
Thank you I appreciate it.
THIS VIDEO IS VERY HELPFULL
This was great – thank you!