Do you often look at your work and think, something is wrong/missing?

This is a demonstration of colour/pigment commonly used in art. A challenge is that most of the pigments used in art making are variable depending on their “ingredients”. Some are chemical, some are natural, some are synthetic, and they are either pigments or dyes.

So how do you determine whether a colour is warm or cool.. Forget your colour wheel, where red is warm, and blue is cool.

I have a little art trick for you to try. The maxim warm comes forward and cool goes backward (recedes) in an artwork is true. So sometimes that is what is wrong with your work. It may look flat or just plain wrong. Maybe the colours just don’t look “right” next to each other.

The image above is a in red. (A warm colour????) I have used many art materials commonly used and widely available in at art supply stores. Each swatch has the medium name beneath it.

Now for the “clever clogs” part ……Try to print the image out in the best print setting on your printer or display it on a larger screen or enlarge it as much as you can on your phone.

What colour comes out at you and what colour goes back (recedes)?

Warm comes forward.

Cool goes backward.

So just because a colour is classified as warm or cool doesn’t mean that it applies when it is in a relationship (platonic of course) with the adjacent colour. So, before you put colour to paper canvas or whatever; and you are not sure about it…… TEST IT TOGETHER, equal swatches of colour and do the the colour dance – backwards and forwards.

You will see that some colour materials are not what they say on the label!!!!!