Learning Color Temperature Will Change How You Paint

The challenge inherent with talking about colors is that there's so many colors that we can see with our eyes and pick with our digital color pickers.

So at the very least, it's impractical, if not impossible, to talk about color by referring to colors individually.

Here's an example of what I mean using just two colors. What would you call this color? I would call it red.

But what about this color? That's red too, right? And how about these?

Now you might say, oh, then let's just add saturation and value into the discussion.

And while that is often useful, we still can't do that here because these colors all have the same saturation and value. So you see the problem.

And with that comes a new, very important term, color temperature.

Chances are you're already familiar with the two most important aspects of color temperature, warm and cool.

These two families, warm and cool, sit on opposite sides of the color wheel.

And because we're dealing with a color wheel, when you gradually shift your hue around the wheel, you are shifting color temperature.

This simple method of understanding or reframing color is

kind of profound because we've now shifted the conversation from talking about the identity of just one color to talking about the relationships of multiple colors as a whole.

You guys are the warmest. You guys are slightly cooler than that. You guys are cooler still. And you guys are the coldest.

The colors are moving, or rather we are moving through the colors as they go around the wheel.

And that is the next important concept in our understanding of color here, movement. Think of them like two train stops.

Your warm stop is here, your cool stop is here. Most of the time, you're not actually at your destination stops.

Most of the time, you're going to be somewhere in transit between the two.

Using color is like that in the sense that usually you're not painting with your warmest or your coolest color.

You're painting with some intermediary color. So here is where

we make our first little chart of how to travel between warm and

cool We're going to do this first one simply with hue So

we've got our warm side here and we've got our cool side here And

the goal is to use only hue to shift between these So

I will sample my warm color and I will simply shift the hue down a little bit and paint a new swatch I will shift the hue down a little bit more and paint a new swatch

I'm trying to shift the hue pretty much evenly every time and I'm just hoping that by the time I'm in the middle of my chart I'm in the middle of these two colors.

So something like this And then what I can do is I'll sample my blue and I will go up this way

Painting my hues until I reach the middle red there and here we go

ultimately meeting our red color and there just like that We've created ourselves a little chart that goes from warm to cool using just hues.

I could have started here as my warm and ended up here as my cool. In fact, let's go ahead and paint that chart.

I'm going to go through the same exercise now where we slowly change the hue picker, the color wheel, on our way from one train stop to the next,

painting these swatches one blending right into the next one, which is what I recommend because

these color temperatures change fluidly you shouldn't leave gaps

between them they should appear to be seamless as you paint anytime

the hue moves this way we are getting cooler and anytime

the hue moves that way we are getting warmer this

chart is a good example of how a single color can move

from warm to cool in this case we have a spectrum of greens a

warm green will err on the yellow side and doing these simple color charts will give you a quick visual as to what different colors look like in their warm versus cool state and this is great.

We're in the ballpark of talking like a painter now. However, if all we had to work with were hues, we'd be pretty much limited to candy-colored paintings or otherwise paintings where every hue had the same saturation.

And that would hit its limit very quickly. So we still need more flexibility with how we can move from warm to cool and back.

For this, we bring in our friend saturation. Now with this chart here, I actually do know what goes exactly in the middle.

It's this perfect gray. So I'll choose my gray and I'll put it right where I think is the middle of this chart.

And now I can reselect my warm color and progress my way toward perfectly desaturated gray in the middle and do the same thing here with the blue.

So here we have yet another chart moving from warm to cool using saturation or the way I like to think of it moving from warm to cool using grays.

Now just like before we could take any two points of this chart say from here to here

and draw ourselves a new chart where those are our final train destinations.

It's the movement from warm to cool that's important, not how much space you're covering.

So long as you've got those two train stops, you're well on your way to good color.

That means that while this color was the coldest one on this chart, it is somewhere in the middle on this chart.

So while this color is indeed colder than, say, that color, it is warmer than that color.

Again, notice the adjectives here. Warmer, cooler. There's always that qualifier. The color never should exist on its own.

It is always going to be up against other colors. So you're always thinking, is it warmer or is it cooler?