Warm and cool colors

[Ogrebane]

Dont know alot about color theory and I probably should just PM einion (Sorry I f spelt your name wrong) but I was just wonder about warm and cool colors.

I assume warm colors contain much yellows and reds and use same for highlights were as cool colors use white for high lights.

Why do you wonder this I here you say. Good question well its becuse I seem to have a few colors I can do well and others that are a b!i@# to do.

Like laterly I am doing a turquios colr for my ogre army and its easy to whip up highlights and shading. When I did slaneesh I did a rose color that I used white to high light and it was the same.

So I was wondering if this is because they are warm/cool or is it a property of the color itself. For instance I have alot of trouble with yellow red and some greens.

Anyway wha do you guys think?

 

[Shawn R. L.]

Not quite sure what the exact question is but here are a few recipies for the colors you mentioned.

Red - you can mix in DARK blue or brown for the shadows. One giving a cool shadow, the other a warm shadow.

Yellow - yellow\'s a bit of a trick. It has intense color but is almost white in tone. I like using just a touch of brown. Dont add so much that the shadow side becomes dark. Dark things have dark shadows, light things have light shadows.

Green - Alot of times the green itself starts out dark so you can use it as it\'s own shadow and simply work towards the light side. If the green you get isnt too dark, try adding dark blue and a touch of black.

On most colors try to avoid using black for mixing in the shadows as it makes them dull and muddy. As with green, brown, and dark blue it can sometimes work. Learn to shade with color first then you can go back to using black more effectively.

I\'m sure Eninon (or however it\'s spelled) could do a better job of instruction.

 

[Ogrebane]

OK maybe I wasnt quite clear. The question was. I find a group of colors that I can highlight shade and blend quite easily. They tend to be any color i can use white and black for highlight and shading. So I was wondering if this is so for all colors that are considered cool colors. (Funny thing is Grey is not a color I can blend well thus my attempts at NMM are not so good)

 

[Wolf Fang]

greens blues teals and such are \"cold colours\" and reds yellows and such are \"warm colours\" the \"cool\" and \"warm\" is more about look not highlighting heat itselfe tends to generate reds oranges and yellows and therefor the eye registers it as a warm colour and feeling.. however when we think of things that are cold we think of greens and blues and less \"vibrant\" colours... here is a model where i painted both warm and cold colours onto... (usualy something 1 wishes to avoid)

http://www.coolminiornot.com/pics/pics8/img42baf79a86492.jpg

please note the grey isnt NEAR that noticable irl lol

 

[airhead]

Ogre, part of that may be the nature of the paints, not the nature of the artists. Most yellows do not cover well (terribly translucent) so titanium white or zinc oxide is added (opaque whites) to give it more opacity.

Reds are often highlighted with oranges or up to yellows even but this is tricky as lots of yellow has to be added to the orange to get a noticible shift - sometimes resulting in chalky looking effect (due to the whites).

Some solutions:
1. try a different brand (one brands greens my be naff while a different brand may be sweet to use)

2. use pure pigments to highlight with. Reapers Master series have a small set of pure pigments for use in blending.

3. Pictures would help.lol

 

[Einion]

Thanks but actually I\'m a bad person to ask about this as I don\'t think this way and except as a very basic description I don\'t think it\'s a good idea to think of colour this way (firstly because it\'s not very accurate). And oh boy, have I had some debates about this in the past! That said it works very well for a lot of painters so if you find it valuable in any way go for it.

Originally posted by Ogrebane
I assume warm colors contain much yellows and reds and use same for highlights were as cool colors use white for high lights.

The general division is:
yellow, orange, red = warm;
green, blue, violet = cool.

This roughly halves the colour wheel but it\'s actually more accurate to split it differently, something like this:
yellow-green, yellow, orange, red, magenta;
violet, blue, cyan, blue-green, green.

This makes cyan the coolest colour and scarlet the warmest, which I think is correct but there is a lot of disagreement on this (the second reason I think the idea isn\'t the best - it\'s subjective).

Originally posted by Ogrebane
Why do you wonder this I here you say. Good question well its becuse I seem to have a few colors I can do well and others that are a b!i@# to do.

Like laterly I am doing a turquios colr for my ogre army and its easy to whip up highlights and shading. When I did slaneesh I did a rose color that I used white to high light and it was the same.

So I was wondering if this is because they are warm/cool or is it a property of the color itself. For instance I have alot of trouble with yellow red and some greens.

Ah, good question. This is actually to do with the nature of the paint itself - the pigments that it\'s made from - and how they change hue when white is added.

Have you ever heard the \'rule\', adding white cools? This is related.

I can go into a lot more detail if you\'re interested.

Einion

 

[Ogrebane]

I would be very interested. I understand the color wheel and how to pic colors but then you have thing where you can pick a warm green and a cool blue and the colors just dont seem to match. For insyab=nce I am using turquios and red but a warm red (GW blood red) doesnt go with it as well as say red gore. But this could be because I highlight and shade red gore with white and black were as I H/L and shade bllod red with yello and black.

As I said I seem to have less problems with blendings etc whith these kinds of colors. I also like to know as much as I can on every subject so I would be interested to know more.

 

[QuietiManes]

To shade a colour you are supposed to add the contrasting colour (opposite on the colour wheel), I think? That might help with the shading instead of black.

I always use yellow/orange to highlight red, it gives you more time before it starts to look like the wrong colour. You can add alot more yellow/orange before it goes orange than you could add white before it goes pink. White should work for all types of reds to highlight them for the first very small amount of white you add, but I think it\'s the make up of the colour pigments that gives you problems comparing one to the other. Certain reds would be more apt to go pink. Reds with less blue and less yellow, further from purple and orange. I.E. the purer the red, I\'d imagine, the quicker it goes pink, and the more you\'d need to use yellow. A red with a touch of blue, a red leaning towards the purple, for example, could be mixed with alot more white before it looked pink. Which is probably where the main difference you notice happens.

Although, I really dont know if that is correct. I often get mixed up and turned around with colour theory because it works different for light and paint.

 

[menace]

The physiological properties of colour are a subjective and culturally influenced response, so to generalise that which is warm and cool is universally impossible. However, in the northern hemisphere we tend to accept that which Einion has summarised very well, another way to think of it is the light spectrum, or rainbow, where the warmest starts at infra-red and the coolest ultra-violet.

When it comes to shading and highlighting you have to consider what type of lighting the colour is being subjected to. If this is normal daylight you don\'t want to darken but rather deepen a colour, using the complimentary colour will achieve this, however you may find the hue or colour saturation too bold to be \'realistic\'. A good solution to this is to also use a pigment like raw umber or paynes grey, for warm and cool respectively. Using black, depending on the nature of a particular paint, generally \'kills\' the colour, you may however find making a black from mixing the primaries will not do so, and actually give more depth.

Yellow is so difficult and it is best to find a top quality artists acrylic with a high but fine pigment content, something like \'Lascaux\'

I hope i haven\'t confused you, but as Einion has said this is a deep issue!

ps. There is an excellent and not too exhaustive book by Johannes Itten on the theory of colour you may find useful, it should be readily available in most libraries art section.

 

[Einion]

Originally posted by Ogrebane
I understand the color wheel and how to pic colors but then you have thing where you can pick a warm green and a cool blue and the colors just dont seem to match.

As mentioned this is as much about personal preference as anything concrete or scientific. I know what you mean about the turquoise and the reds for example - this is just one of those things we have to find out/decide for ourselves.

This link might be some help; http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html I talk about the problems with it in this thread. But remember your taste is all that really matters.

Originally posted by Ogrebane
But this could be because I highlight and shade red gore with white and black were as I H/L and shade bllod red with yello and black.

Yes. This is as much about the change in hue as you lighten and darken as about the basic colours themselves.

For anyone that is a little unsure of the basic colour terminology I\'ll just lay this out here so that it\'s hopefully easier to follow:
Hue - the basic colour category; yellow, orange, green, blue.
Value - how light or dark something is; high value is lighter, low value is darker (from 10 to 0 on some scales, such as the Munsell system).
Chroma - the intensity of a colour, how brilliant it looks; a high-chroma orange is like THIS, a low-chroma orange is like coffee with milk in it (browns are actually duller oranges and orange-yellows).

So about lightening, let\'s look at red to begin with. When you add white to a red paint (always remember when mixing we\'re dealing with paint not \'colours\' and rules may not apply) it can lead to the obvious pinks that can look out of place, one common way of countering this is to also add in some yellow, or orange. This change in colour is often referred to as \"the white \'cools\' the red\" by artists.

Now why does the addition of yellow make it look better often? Because in addition to raising the value, the white is also changing the hue, \'cooling\' the colour toward crimson/magenta. Since yellow is in the opposite direction to magenta (on a colour wheel) adding some in compensates for this change in hue keeping it the same as the base colour; that is actually what is going on in colour terms and IMO it\'s better to think in this way as it\'s less woolly.

This same principle works with many reds (not all) as well as oranges and greens, so if just using white doesn\'t look right try adding in some yellow, see how it looks.

Now about that rule I mentioned at the end of my last post: if we take a certain blue (I can\'t give other examples in hobby paints because I don\'t know them at all but I think VMC Dark Prussian Blue is the right pigment) and add white it begins to look cyan... this is actually a shift in hue toward green which is considered warmer than blue! So like a lot of \'rules\' in painting don\'t take it without a pinch of salt

Einion

 

[Einion]

Originally posted by QuietiManes
To shade a colour you are supposed to add the contrasting colour (opposite on the colour wheel), I think? That might help with the shading instead of black.

A mixing complement; this would be if you want realistic colour as shadows are generally darker and duller than the basic colour. In mini painting though we\'ll often want to paint very differently to this.

Originally posted by QuietiManes
Although, I really dont know if that is correct. I often get mixed up and turned around with colour theory because it works different for light and paint.

Yep, additive and subtractive theory.

Light is always additive theory - two colours are added together to make a third (red + green = yellow).

Paint is always subtractive theory (same with ink, coloured pencil, food dye) - mixtures subtract light from what is shining on it and you see the remainder that is reflected back. That\'s why when you mix two paints that are mixing complements you get a dark grey or something close to black, it has subtracted enough light that you only get a little back.

Originally posted by menace
The physiological properties of colour are a subjective and culturally influenced response...

Yep, lots of cultural conditioning - look at the traditional colour of mourning in parts of Asia: white.

Originally posted by menace
another way to think of it is the light spectrum, or rainbow, where the warmest starts at infra-red and the coolest ultra-violet.

The problem with just thinking of colour in spectral terms is that a spectrum doesn\'t contain magenta, red-violets and purple.

Originally posted by menace
If this is normal daylight you don\'t want to darken but rather deepen a colour, using the complimentary colour will achieve this, however you may find the hue or colour saturation too bold to be \'realistic\'.

A complement, a mixing complement, will dull a paint down - that\'s its function and how they\'re used in representational painting to mix realistic shadow colours.

Originally posted by menace
Using black, depending on the nature of a particular paint, generally \'kills\' the colour...

I know you qualified this but black often does a better job of darkening than other choices - as most people would define \'kills\' mixing complements actually do this more than black.

Originally posted by menace
...you may however find making a black from mixing the primaries will not do so, and actually give more depth.

More depth? Depth is about value range and maximum value range is most easily achieved using black.

Originally posted by menace
Yellow is so difficult...

Shading yellow is just plain tricky!

Originally posted by menace
ps. There is an excellent and not too exhaustive book by Johannes Itten on the theory of colour you may find useful, it should be readily available in most libraries art section.

Itten\'s work has some useful elements but there\'s a lot of nonsense in it - I think blanket acceptance of Goethe\'s colour associations - and perhaps most importantly it\'s hard to apply much of it to practical painting. Checking back on a previous discussion I\'ve had about his book I\'m reminded that I found it significant that he had to revamp some of his initial ideas when faced with contrary evidence when he taught his well-educated students!

Einion

 

[menace]

@Einion,

I agree! I tried to keep it simple, some ideas about black may differ though. Your knowledge is admirable