Colour – 3. Within the hue: Temperature

Colours are often described in terms of temperature as “cool” or “warm”. These psychological associations have a lot to do with certain physical characteristics, like red-fire-warm, yellow-sun-warm or blue-ice-cold, green-shade-cold. Still, the feeling of warm and cool is relative. The same color might appear cool in the company of warm yellows and oranges and warm surrounded by cool greens.

(I’ll look at it closer later this month when talking about contrasts.)

When thinking of the colour wheel, it can be roughly divided in half: warm colours stretching from red-violet to yellow and cool colours from violet to yellow green.

Before we go deeper into it, I’d like to make a small exercise.

Please prepare a grid of 6 x 7 squares. Something like it is on the photo.

Take your coloured pencils or pastels or even your scraps of fabric and fill the squares of the horizontal rows as follows:

·      1. row: only cool colours (don’t think much, this is not a beaux-arts competition, chose your colours randomly.)

·      2. row: 5 cool colours and 1 warm colour.

·      3. row: 4 cool colours and 2 warm colours

·      4. row: 3 cool colours and 3 warm colours

·      5. row: 2 cool colours and 4 warm colours

·      6. row: 1 cool colour and 5 warm colours

·      7. row: only warm colours.

When finished look at the composition. Again try to collect adjectives to describe the sensation you get with the warm colours on the top and with the cool colours on the top.

Here is my example:

The warm colours feel much heavier. When they are down, the composition feels stable and static. The top is more airy.

Are the warm colours by the majority on the top, our sensation of balance is disturbed. A feeling of insecurity, incertitude is coming up and I expect those “heavy bricks” to fall down and crush all the airy cool bricks below.

So this is again a knowledge we can use consciously in our design. It works also on the horizontal level. Everything else being equal, warm colours generally “come forward” in the space. Cool colours, on the other hand, reced in our vision. Painters often take advantage of this aspect to create the illusion of depth.

Cezanne used this so called colour-perspective very often, especially in his still lifes:

Just two more examples. First Miro’s Figures at Night Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails.

And second a Gee's Bend Quilt von Luisiana P. Bendolph: „Housetop“ Variation

In both the reds are just coming forward, creating the impression of space.

Contrast of temperature can also be used to create mood. Though reactions to colours are somewhat subjective and different from culture to culture, general tendencies apply. Arrangements dominated by cool colours typically evoke feelings of peace, quiet, serenity, and tranquility. Warm arrangements often bring about feelings that are relatively active and dynamic, from vivacity and joy to anger.

Colour Workshop - 2. About value

Value refers the relative lightness or darkness of a colour. Each colour has its equivalent on the grayscale, each picture can be viewed in black and white.

If you feel unsure at this point collect coloured papers in a line and try to define their value on a grayscale. Example:

You can repeat this exercise with your fabrics you intend to use on a quilt as well. (You can check your results by making a photo of your coloured papers and converting it into black and white.)

The question today is: How does value change make the difference in a picture? For that make the following exercise before you continue to read on.

Regard the following three grayscale-compositions for 30 seconds and write down 5-10 adjectives what characterize each grid best.

So let’s compare notes!

My adjectives for the first composition were: quiet, calm, open, light, airy, de-energized, free from tension, monotonous, boring, flat.

Second composition: calm, quiet, gloomy, cheerless, grave, dark, airtight, dense, flat

Third composition: strong, dynamic, vivid, full of suspense, vibrant, sensation of depth.

Of course, you might not be in complete agreement with my adjectives, colour perception is happening in the mind and we’re all different. But the main conclusion is, that full-scale values are very important for a dynamic composition.

It is not just how many hues you use but which values you have what makes the difference.

Black and white photography eliminates hue and saturation, leaving only value. Here is an example of my Cityscapes #2 in colour and in black and white.

The full-scale values (from light to dark) support the dynamic image of the city.

David Hockney has not used many colours in his A Bigger Splash, but he has full-scale values in the picture as you can see. Outside the splash, it is a very quiet picture. No action on it. But using full-scale values, from light to dark, prevents it to be boring. On the opposite it only increases the tension so the splash feels real. This is a very clever usage of the values.

Another example: Picasso painted his famous Guernica in “grisaille”, which is a term for a painting executed entirely in monochrome or near-monochrome, usually in shades of gray.

He uses light grays for everything living and very dark grays for objects and the background. This huge contrast creates a very dramatic effect supporting the story behind this masterpiece.

Well, this is about value. Pay attention to it, because it can underline what you want to express.

A tip: lay down your chosen fabrics, make a photo and convert it in black and white, controlling the values. Think of the adjectives you collected: which value scale evokes the kind of sensation you aim to create!

Colour Workshop - 1.Introduction

“COLOUR IS MY DAY-LONG OBSESSION, JOY AND TORMENT” Claude Monet

Claude Monet: Rouen Cathedral

I know that this is a technique-oriented blog but in my eyes, any technique is as good as usable it is. And theory can give a foundation to technique – to use it more consciously. So In September I would like to make a series of theoretical inputs and connect them with exercises. I taught workshops on design principles where we also explored the principle elements of design.

There is not even a complete consensus on the principle elements of design but I consider 5 of them to be the basics: the line, the mark, the form and the space, the texture and the colour.

Colour is the most complex of them. Most of us handle it intuitively but I found that people appreciated to KNOW why and how colour works – so I choosed it as the topic of this month.

As I said I will make short theoretical introductions and give some exercises to try out. They will be rather short ones concentrating on the learning effect. So if any of you would like to do them and would send me the results, I would love to show them on the blog afterwards.

Joseph Albers: Hommage to the Square

OK, let’s get started!

We perceive the lights reflected from the surface of the object as colour. Colours that seem to be similar have nearly the same wavelengths. The perception takes places in the mind, so there is an immense “individual” aspect in it.

Each colour can be manipulated either by colour mixing or, more subtly, by altering the context in which they appear. And this latter one, the context, is which I would like to examine carefully.

There are three fundamental factors to specify colours: hue, value and saturation.

The hue is defined by the wavelength and generally referred as “colours” like green, red, blue, etc. The conventional 12-colored wheel shows the three primary hues: red, blue, yellow, the secondaries (always a mixture of two primaries): orange, green, purple and the tertiaries (mixture of adjoining primaries and secondaries). Different hues can be reached by colour mixing.  This is the part, which I’m NOT going to discuss this month.

But these hues, I’ll refer them as colours from now on, can elicit different sensations in different contexts:

• Sometimes I perceive a certain colour in a context as dark, in another one as medium or even light.  Why?
• Blue is considered as a “cold” colour. Isn’t there any “warm blue”?
• And how can a colour sometimes be “bright” an in connection with other ones rather “dull”?

These are the questions I’ll try to answer during the next few days.