Warm and cool colours

In the January 2016 LP magazine Tony Paul an expert artist has an article all about colours cool and warm and how to mix colours that are compatible. i.e. A warm cad. red plus a warm cad yellow gives a brilliant orange. Using a cool lemon yellowwould give a muted orange. i havent learnt anything new from him yet but it is a series and it promises to be very interesting for all practicing artists and colour theorists may also find it of interest. ....Syd

"Warm" and "cool" have no objective meaning in terms of colour, and the terms are or little use. There is obviously no physical basis for them. The only point in using them is to indicate the degree of red or blue in any given hue, red being taken as warm, blue as cold. The colour wheel, however it's formulated, has little objective reality either. It would perhaps be a good idea to discard these terms altogether. There are colours which contain a greater or lesser degree of red, others that contain or carry blue - this is useful in colour mixing terms, the "warmth" or "coldness" of a colour less so. A US painter, who shares her somewhat dubious opinions on the web, recently suggested that Ultramarine was a cooler colour than Pthalo Blue - confusing warmth with strength and ending up with complete nonsense. Objectively, Ultramarine carries more red than Pthalo Blue, and that's the only useful indicator. PS - that US painter is indeed Sharon L Hicks, to which you link: I'm afraid I think she talks complete rubbish on this subject.

He has his critics, but the British painter and chemist Michael Willcox (the Michael Willcox School of Colour) has much to say about this - and on the whole, I'm on his side not that of his detractors. I wouldn't limit myself to the colours he recommends and sells - but then he's quite open about the fact that it's the science that's the important thing: his paints, made by Da Vinci, are of very good quality but you don't have to use them to make the science work.... others would do just as well. He does explain, as perhaps no one did before, what goes into a given hue, what it consists of; and I've found this of immense use in colour mixing, where previously I had relied on decades of experience of individual colours: using Willcox's method, you don't have to toil for 50 years before gaining confidence that the colours you mix will give you the results you want. It's basically the split primary palette approach, with the information to support it which had hitherto been largely lacking.

Agreed, and this is where some of the disagreements with Michael Willcox originate. I'm less interested (and much less competent) in that area than I am in the breakdown of colours - ie, which carries what, as it were. The colour wheel has its uses, but it can also be seriously misleading. And the theory can be a problem for the reason Syd suggests (Yes, Syd, we DO read your posts!) - you need to know what blue, for example, complements which orange. Willcox does go into this at some length, wrote a couple of interesting books on the subject (I made the fatal mistake of lending mine to someone, and have never got it back) and has produced a palette which is notated so that you can see which of the 12 colours he recommends work with the others and how they relate - I couldn't begin to explain that, though had a brief stab in my e-book; I could only sketch out the basics there; you'll have to go and see: Google School of Colour for more. It's also a problem because Syd is again right that a paint-box isn't a chemistry set - some people just aren't going to want to delve into the science. However, two points - one, I'm not any great shakes as a scientist, I didn't even get the A level, but I found it extremely interesting because I am interested in colour, and that was the main thing, not the chemistry or science of light. And two, I think that the learner painter who is prepared to do just a bit of reading and thinking will benefit a lot from acquainting themselves with Willcox's work - it will smooth their path rather than complicate it - you can learn the hard way, as probably all three of us did, (Amanda, Syd and me) but it takes years. This stuff isn't taught in art schools so far as I know - it ought to be; I don't care how many diplomas or degrees people emerging from these institutions have, they don't mean a damn' thing if you have little understanding of how colour works and how you can mix the colour you want rather than find yourself slapping paint about on the palette in the fond hope something useful will emerge - it hardly ever does, unless you're looking for the colour of mucky mangle-wurzels. You can of course complicate anything if you try hard (oddly enough, it's usually because you don't try hard enough: simplicity takes effort) but once you grasp the basic principles of the split palette it's actually straightforward. You can look much deeper if you want to, and get into all sorts of interesting fields if that's what you want to do: but there's no obligation to do that when you'd much rather be putting the theory into practice and getting on with your painting.