Warm and Cool Colors

 

The concept of warm and cool colors has been written about for hundreds of years. The general idea is the warm colors are Red, Orange and Yellow; and the cool colors are Green, Blue and Magenta. In this article, naïve art painter David Berkowitz Chicago will mention the essentials of the topic of warm and cold colors.

How to create the illusion of volume through the use of color?

 

When talking about color in painting, this is one of the first themes that usually comes out. It is something definitely important because it is linked to many different themes that will contribute to the composition of your works and that, when applied properly, will give it a special depth and a sensory connection with the observer that goes far beyond its two dimensions.

You have surely seen one or more paintings that transmitted something like this to you. That they transport you towards what they represent or that it seems that they bring it before you with a kind of augmented reality ... Well, the temperature of the colors contributes greatly to achieve these effects, explains David Berkowitz Chicago.

Correctly used, warm and cold colors are one of those elements that can amplify the general atmosphere of what you want to say with your work, and although what we say is not new, usually there is a much more basic perception of its use.

Thus, this time David Berkowitz Chicago hopes to help you get a better understanding of the temperature of colors and put this knowledge into practice, test it yourself and see the benefit of its application reflected in your works.

In theory

The great artists did not arrive at such a fresh, lively and inspiring handling of color as that of the Impressionists (or approaching more towards the confines of abstraction, that of the Fauvists) by mere luck.

The theories of color evolved from the primitive palette (with its red, black, yellow and white as the basis of all pictorial composition) and all the meaning attributed to these colors, to the modern chromatic circle. In fact, it is more correct to say the modern chromatic circles, because in reality, for reasons of specialties, practicality and diversification, different approaches to color can be recognized. And this was not only a matter of observation: it was a matter of materials.

So on the one hand we have Newton and his discoveries about light and color, but we also have the aspect of chemistry applied to the arts, where we did not work with beams of light but with different plants, minerals and other materials to obtain the pigments used in graphic representations of all kinds.

Here, the mixture of the so-called primary colors does not result in white, but depending on the pigments, very dark browns or grays and ideally black could be obtained. However, it is true that the approximations of physics and chemistry intersect at different points.

Being enthusiastic observers of these variations, various artists, thinkers and scientists began to refine and increase their conception of color quite organically, since it was evident that not all shades of different colors served the same purpose when painting and representing. different objects in a space.

This, together with the symbolism given to colors and the emotional perception associated with it, allowed us to make certain distinctions, such as temperature, concludes the Chicago-based artist.