The trouble with the blues

I‘ve been thinking more about cool and warm blues. 

Let’s take the colour wheel and put that pure blue at the bottom, just for practical reasons. This pure blue is the coolest of the cool, super cool. On the opposite side we habe orange, this should then be the warmest. On the top left and top right we have pure red and pure yellow. They are warm, I would say equally warm, judging from their distance from the orange. No one doubts that if you put even a little bit of blue into that pure red or that pure yellow you cool them down. If you put some yellow into the red or vice versa, you make them warmer. So you can always say if, for example, a red is warm relative to pure red or cool relative to pure red. This is easy. 

But for the blue it means that if you put a little red or a little yellow in it you make the blue warmer, because both red and yellow are warm colours. So relative to pure blue all other blues are warm blues. So you can only say if one blue is cooler or warmer than the other. None of them, exept for pure blue, is warm or cool. If, for example, you create a colour with 80% blue and 20% yellow on the one hand and a colour with 90% blue and 10% red on the other hand, the one with the yellow in it is warmer than the one with the red in it, because it contains more of a warm colour and less of the super cool blue. Everything that moves away from the super cool blue in either direction turns warmer. In my example, the blue with the yellow is farther away from cool blue than the blue with the red.

If what I have written above is as far away from nonsense as it can be (or at least far enough), from a physics point of view phtalo blue is actually warmer than ultramarine. Still, most people seem to perceive the opposite. Why? I think it could be because they perceive red as warmer than yellow and so a blue with added red is always perceived as warmer by them than one with added yellow. Also, it’s difficult to see if the proportion of red in one blue is higher than the proportion of yellow in that other blue. So it’s a fight between physics and subjective perception and the point is what of the two we consider more important in art, in painting.

Some more thoughts on colour mixing

 There is a problem with using the terms cool colours and warm colours when explaining colour mixing. Some people consider a blue that leans towards red a cool blue and a blue that leans towards green a warm blue. I am not sure why they do so, but it doesn’t make sense to me. Blue is considered a cool colour. If you mix in a warm colour like red, it gets warmer. If you mix in another cool colour like green it doesn’t get warmer, but stays cool.

The good thing is that these labels aren’t important when deciding what colours to mix to get a certain effect. You just have to have a look at the colour wheel. Mixing colours that are far away from each other results in dull, muddy colours. Mixing colours that are close together results in brilliant colours. Both effects can be just what you want. Some people mix their browns and greys by mixing complementary colours.

Colour Mixing

 If you want to start painting, you had better have some knowledge of colour theory, at least some basic one. Well, you could buy lots of different colours and use them as they are, but that would be very expensive and not practical. 

With just the basics you can already tweak your standard colours a bit. Want your red more orangey? Mix it with a little yellow. Want to make violet from your blue? Mix the blue with a little bit of red. And there is nothing wrong with already having a green and an orange and maybe also a violet in your palette. And some browns. With this you already have quite some options. 

The next step would be to understand that there are warm and cool versions of basic colours. A warm red leans towards orange, a cool one towards violet. A warm blue leans towards violet, a cool one towards green. A warm yellow leans towards orange, a cool one towards green. If you want to, say, mix a good, brillant violet, mix a warm blue and a cool red. They both already lean towards violet. If you do the opposite, you get a quite muddy colour. 

It can also be helpful to know that you can tone down colours by mixing them - carefully- with their complementary colour, for example put a little bit of red into your green. The resulting colour is a less saturated, that is a less brilliant green.

With this knowledge you can experiment with your paints and see what you can come up with. Mix a warm yellow and a warm green and enjoy the colour you get.