Warm and cool of each color you own
Okay. Water and paper stuff is behind you for now, we're moving into color, and this is the lesson that actually changes how your paintings look more than almost anything else we'll do.
Here's the thing nobody tells beginners: every color you own has a temperature. Not literally, obviously, your blue isn't warm to the touch. But every single pigment leans slightly toward warm or slightly toward cool, even within its own family. You've got a warm blue and a cool blue. A warm red and a cool red. Same for yellow. And if you don't know which is which, you're mixing half-blind.
Why this matters more than you'd think
Mixing a good green depends on which blue and which yellow you grab. Mixing a clean purple depends on which red and which blue. Grab the wrong pairing and you don't get clean color, you get mud, and not the good-on-purpose kind we'll talk about later. You get the sad, accidental kind.
So today we sort your six colors into warm and cool before we mix anything.
How to actually tell warm from cool
Squeeze or wet out every color you've got. Little dab of each on a scrap of the cheap paper, spaced out.
The test I use: does it lean toward yellow, or does it lean toward blue? A warm red (something like a cadmium red or a scarlet) has a little orange hiding in it. A cool red (something like alizarin or a quinacridone rose) has a little purple hiding in it. Same logic for blue and yellow.
If you're not sure, drop a tiny bit of each color next to plain water on your palette and let it thin out. Diluted color tells the truth faster than concentrated color does.
Write it down. I mean actually write "warm" or "cool" in pencil next to each pan or tube label. You will forget by next week, I promise you, I still double check mine sometimes.
The mixing test
Once you've sorted them, do this:
- Mix your warm blue with your warm yellow. Look at the green.
- Mix your cool blue with your cool yellow. Look at that green.
- Mix warm blue with cool yellow, then cool blue with warm yellow.
You'll get four different greens from two blues and two yellows. That's the whole lesson in one exercise. Same logic works for oranges (red plus yellow) and purples (red plus blue).
Generally, the cleanest, most vibrant mixes happen when you pair warm-with-warm or cool-with-cool. Cross a warm and a cool and you get a duller, grayer version. Not wrong, just different. Sometimes duller is exactly what you want.
Which brings me to the mountains.
I tried painting the point of the mountain from my back patio last summer, and it came out looking like a green blob. Just a shape. No life to it. Steven walked by, looked at it, tilted his head and said "is that the point of the mountain," and yeah, technically it was, but it didn't feel like it. The problem wasn't my drawing. It was color. I'd used one green straight out of the mixing and slapped it on flat. Real foothills aren't one green. They're this shifting warm-to-cool thing depending on the light and the season, especially by August when everything's dried out and gone that dusty gold-green. Once I started mixing a warmer green for the sunlit parts and a cooler green for the shadowed folds, the same shape suddenly read as a mountain instead of a blob. Same drawing. Different temperature choices. That's the whole trick.
A word on mud, since we're here
My opinion, stated as an opinion: mud is fine, actually. People panic the second a mix goes grayish or dull and they think they've ruined it. Sometimes you have. But a lot of the time that dull, grayed-down color is exactly what real landscape looks like, especially dry-grass hillsides in late summer around here. Learn what pairing of warm and cool makes mud so you can reach for it on purpose, instead of being scared of your own palette.
Try this at home
Take your six colors, sort warm and cool, then mix every possible green, orange, and purple combination on a scrap page. Label each one. Keep that page. It becomes your cheat sheet, and honestly it's more useful than any color wheel poster.
One caution: let each little mix dry before you judge it. Wet color always looks more saturated than it dries. Out here especially, with how fast things dry, you'll be tempted to judge too early. Wait it out.
Before next time: bring your labeled color-temperature swatch page back with you, we'll use it directly when we start mixing greens for real next lesson.