Warm & Cool Colours in Painting
Some colour theorists confute the notion of warm & cool colours, saying it is far too culturally relative to be constant. Red in one culture is perceived as cool whilst in another it is considered warm. Weither or not scientists use the concept of warm / cool is up to them, IMO. As painters, I believe it to be essential. As painters, we are more concerned with how colours relate to each others rather than finding definite, all embracing, verbal linguistic definitions of colour. Getting them to ‘work’ pictorially….is what interests me.
Bruce Macevoy at Handprint.com boils it down to saying that warm colours are more colour rich than cool colours. ie they are more intense & more saturated.
The visual push-pull that happens between warm/cool is because they are opposite sides of the colour wheel & thus give a greater contrast than a range of colours that are pre-domoninantly cool or warm colours.

Adam Cope
1997
oil on panel
62 x 23 cm
©
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Paintings built with adjacent colours are less contrasty & tend to give a more harmonious end-result. These colours are adjacent to each other on the colour wheel & tend not too clash, have low contrast & can have the contiguity of ‘good neighbours’.
Here is a painting built using a gamme of cool greens & blues, darks & the odds warm brown. The key is low contrast & the mood I find, is cool & calm.
Adam Cope
1996
Oil on Canvas
©
The next painting is cool. Adjacent blues & turquoises & greens play off against high whites & yellows. The key is higher; not all cool paintings need to be glum & gloomy.
Try placing a warm colour accent on the focal point. The orange stroke is warmer than the background & thus atracts the eye… ‘Jewel in the Crown’ was what nineteenth century ‘how to paint’ books called this recipe.
Again, placing the warmest colour on the focal point…
Adam Cope
1996
oil on panel
32 x 26 cm
©
warm or cool ?? : this is the question you need to ask yourself when confronted with ‘tricky’ not quiet greys or could-be browns or might-be greens, colours which are difficult to perceive & even more difficult to mix.
Nice post Adam – I’ll be referencing it from my blog in The Colour Project “round-up”.
Someone told me warm paintings outsell cool by far. I believe it.
I studied with Ovanes Berberian, who studied with Serge Bongard. He told me once that everyone asks him what great secrets of painting that Serge taught him, and he said, Serge simply repeated, balance warm against cool, warm against cool. I think it’s that dance between the two that excites the eye.
Bravo! The illustrations (using your fine art) say it all.
Long live color temperature!
B. Macevoy’s idea is new to me. I’ll have to explore that one.
thank you all
colour temperature can of course be used in a low-key subtle kind of way as well.