Watching this is kind of a relief because I personally perceive a slightly purplish blue to be "cooler" and slightly greenish blue to be "warmer" but people state the opposite as if it were fact. If it's partially arbitrary and partially about colour temperature/spectral lighting/atmospheric scattering that makes more sense to me.
This is what I do, although I do this specifically for grey scale painting: I use three shades of warmer grey for things closer to the eye, and three shades of cooler grey for things that are dark or recede from the eye. This way you get the clarity that you might get from Black And White photography, but the color depthness of full color painting.
I think the world would be a better place if Warm/Cool wasn't burned into art students' brains. It's useful to many but it's also arbitrary. Learning about simultaneous contrast and subtractive mixing concepts are way more important as a foundation.
And I wish students were actually taught to draw but hey jumping headlong into complex practices of secondary importance seems to be the vibe these days.
How tf is it arbitrary? Show me natural red ice. Show me freezing cold red/orange/yellow things. Find someone who says "the sun is blue". These things are based on reality
@@SaintJames14 Put some ice on a table and light it under a red lighting gel and tell me how cool the colors look then. Local color can very quickly be overpowered by strongly colored light. Also, keep in mind, we're talking under the context of visual art. Human eyes can't see temperature, sadly. I'm sure you'd be comfortable reaching out and touching the blue flame on your stovetop, right? Since it'd be so cool.
Very Cool! I've always thought that having colder colors in the shadows and warmer in the highlights it's almost a coincidence, because the blue sky will light the whole scene softly but the sun will only light the highlights, leaving the blue sky light to be the only thing hitting the shadows. This only happens in a sunny blue sky day, but that's common enough to be extrapolated to other scenes for artistic vision some times
Love it. It's almost just a cultural construct of Western artists, though I find myself thinking in these terms too and it would probably be difficult to change.
I always assumed this "warm" and "cold" colours thing was just a subconcious approximation of the black body ratiation spectrum (that goes from infra red, to dark red, red, orange, yellow, white, azure blue, ultra violet) but because it was probably northern europeans that invented the naming they associated the hottest colours white and blue with snow and ice, and the colder dark and red and yellows are the only easily achievable flame or glowing metal colours we associate with heat and warmth. Also because northern European buildings are generally built to keep you warm in winter, "indoors" is almost always warmer than outdoors, and until we got fancy lightbulbs the bluish light of daylight was only possible in the relative colder outdoors. Though logically we should associate a red sunset with cold; whenever we're outside (in the north) to watch a sunset we're probably also having a fireplace (with it's matching yellow red colors) and wearing warmer clothes. Also even today having something that is blue hot that is big enough for us to feel the warmth of it is rather rare, and at that temperature it's really blindingly bright anyway so we can't really look at it and notice it's blueness anwyay, so we can't build any intuition about how it's really actually hotter. One of the few things besides the sun (which is really far away) that is white to blue hot is welding sparks, but unless you're a welder yourself, you probably mostly see it outdoors from far away on a work site which if anything just strengthens the blue = outdoors = cold association.
I've always thought having green be part of either "warm" or "cold" colours was rather artificial, because green is literally not part of the black body spectrum. To me green has always been "neutral" on the colloquial "warm" to "cold" spectrum since green is the colour of foilage. So it's only "warm" when it's tinted yellow by the warm midday sun (and I guess because when sunlight shines through a leaf you see more of the yellow/red undertones of the plant tissue than when you see the light reflecting off the top of a leaf which is more dense with chlorophyll), and "cold" when it's in the cold shade tinted by the more "cold" blue of indirect ambient sky light. And in the colder darker periods of the day it appears black anyway.
I've often wondered if people from tropical areas (at least before they were exposed to the European ideas about colours) would have almost the opposite idea. If the bluish light of daylight is always experienced together with high heat outdoors. And if your house is designed to keep the inside as cool as possible during the day, it's probably comparatively cold at night when the only source of light would be a small fire. And you would not have any deep association of the bluish white of snow and ice, because you might have never seen it up close unless you're mountain climbing or at all if you're nowhere near a tall mountain. And since direct sunlight is more immediately painfully hot in the tropics; I'd assume the association would be stronger with brightness meaning hot and darkness meaning cold regardless of hue. And in many tropical areas the earth is pretty ochre yellow or rust red in colour so even in the shade the reflected light of any exposed dirt will make the shade less blue tinted than the less reflective dark brown dirt and the deeper blue-green leaves and pine trees of the north does.
@@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug You could see that in a famous brazilian 19th painter José Ferraz de Almeida Junior. He was known exactly beause what you're saying. Most of his painting are pretty rust red, and ochre yellow. One reason was the disponibility of the pigments,and the region he was born, Itu ( country city of São Paulo, that had more yellow sun, and red dust ).
1:31 I thought it was Leonardo da Vinci who had come up with the idea of aerial perspective? That's what I was taught in art school, anyway - was that incorrect? EDIT: According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Although the use of aerial perspective has been known since antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci first used the term aerial perspective in his Treatise on Painting, in which he wrote: “Colours become weaker in proportion to their distance from the person who is looking at them.” -- I guess his notebooks just weren't widely available in the 18th century.
As far as I know da Vinci didn't distinguish certain hues (warm ones) becoming weaker with distance, which is the 18th century innovation in de Lairesse and Bardwell
For those who would like to know more about this, reading Michael Wilcox's "Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green, 2nd ed." will give you scientific insight as to how light waves behave once they encounter the paint film. Wilcox, as far as I know, is the first person to point out that the three primaries themselves are never pure but have a leaning, or "bias," towards a secondary. This means that all reds lean toward either violet or orange, yellows toward orange or green, blues toward green or violet. So we really ought to think of the painter's color wheel in terms of six primaries, not three. This will unlock color mixing, and it also encourages us to think about temperature when choosing which primary to work with in any given instance, as Gartside was beginning to understand in her writings ( 3:38 ).
The first to suggest paint mixing primaries leaning one way or another due to impurity is D'Aguilon in 1613 - Wilcox's work presents itself as scientific but his ideas are based in fundamental errors regarding how light works. MacEvoy on handprint (dot) com has a thorough and helpful critique of Wilcox. That being said, you are right that there is no logical reason to limit your mixing palette to three colors! There are great 4-, 5-, and 6-primary palettes for painters :)
@@ColorNerd1 Not sure if you have a video on Wilcox and MacEvoy in your library yet, but I would be extremely interested if you don't! Wilcox's tone is so convincing, and I don't specialize in this domain, so I never even thought to look for critiques!
I maybe didn't follow but would you say the concept of cool and warm color is a cultural made up conception or does it have any real meaning to say that cool colors recede? Or is it more about high croma colors are precieved to advance more? Thank you for very interesting videos!
It's mostly a cultural/theoretical thing to be taken with caution. Colour (hue, chroma, saturation, temperature) and subject contexts will make the difference. He explained that in the video when talking about the cool/warm sun.
"Cool colors recede" was sort of based in atmospheric perspective; distance does reduce the chroma of hues we call warm due to Rayleigh scattering filtering out more and more longer wavelengths as more and more atmosphere is between you and what you're looking at. MacEvoy also argues that the perception of color as warm or cool is related to our vision evolving to adapt under regular daylight CCT changes over the day. Warm light (light with a spectral bias toward long wavelengths) renders blues and greens duller, because blue and green objects have less light to reflect. My take is that the color theorists in the 18th century were on to something, but Hayter dividing the RYB wheel into warm/cool obfuscated the nature of color temperature for artists, by treating temperature as an abstract quality of hue, rather than an effect of the spectral bias of the light source.
What's cultural is the _meaning_ attached to the differences in color and color temperature. To give a simple example, in the West we associate white with purity and innocence, thus a bride wears white at her wedding because she's moving from inexperience into a more committed relationship than she had before, whereas in parts of Africa and East Asia, white is associated with death and worn at funerals, not weddings.
If I understand correct, there is no differense in how we percieve the colors (hue) red and blue as receeding or advancing forward towards the viewer as long as they are equally saturated?
This whole thing is ridiculous. It's not "cultural" - summer isn't blue to anyone on earth besides an eskimo, and even they see certain hues more often then. These arguments on pedantics are frustrating
![YoungBoy Never Broke Again - Sneaking [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1ILUps2zDFU/mqdefault.jpg)
Watching this is kind of a relief because I personally perceive a slightly purplish blue to be "cooler" and slightly greenish blue to be "warmer" but people state the opposite as if it were fact. If it's partially arbitrary and partially about colour temperature/spectral lighting/atmospheric scattering that makes more sense to me.
This is what I do, although I do this specifically for grey scale painting:
I use three shades of warmer grey for things closer to the eye, and three shades of cooler grey for things that are dark or recede from the eye. This way you get the clarity that you might get from Black And White photography, but the color depthness of full color painting.
Love your channel. You put together history and physics and personal perseptions into one logical narrative. It is a pleasure to learn from you 💚
Well said, I agree.
I think the world would be a better place if Warm/Cool wasn't burned into art students' brains. It's useful to many but it's also arbitrary. Learning about simultaneous contrast and subtractive mixing concepts are way more important as a foundation.
And I wish students were actually taught to draw but hey jumping headlong into complex practices of secondary importance seems to be the vibe these days.
How tf is it arbitrary? Show me natural red ice. Show me freezing cold red/orange/yellow things. Find someone who says "the sun is blue". These things are based on reality
@@SaintJames14 blue stars are hotter than red ones. the surface of many dwarf planets and kuiper belt objects are covered in red ice.
@@SaintJames14 Put some ice on a table and light it under a red lighting gel and tell me how cool the colors look then. Local color can very quickly be overpowered by strongly colored light. Also, keep in mind, we're talking under the context of visual art. Human eyes can't see temperature, sadly. I'm sure you'd be comfortable reaching out and touching the blue flame on your stovetop, right? Since it'd be so cool.
@@SaintJames14plus fire, the blue flames are the hottest
Very Cool! I've always thought that having colder colors in the shadows and warmer in the highlights it's almost a coincidence, because the blue sky will light the whole scene softly but the sun will only light the highlights, leaving the blue sky light to be the only thing hitting the shadows. This only happens in a sunny blue sky day, but that's common enough to be extrapolated to other scenes for artistic vision some times
🎉
Love it. It's almost just a cultural construct of Western artists, though I find myself thinking in these terms too and it would probably be difficult to change.
It's quite funny that the temperature of blackbody radiation is the opposite, blue is hot and red is cooler.
Well, *I* think it's funny.
Never ceases to bother the physicists who stumble into artistic color lore 😂
Very interesting!
I always assumed this "warm" and "cold" colours thing was just a subconcious approximation of the black body ratiation spectrum (that goes from infra red, to dark red, red, orange, yellow, white, azure blue, ultra violet) but because it was probably northern europeans that invented the naming they associated the hottest colours white and blue with snow and ice, and the colder dark and red and yellows are the only easily achievable flame or glowing metal colours we associate with heat and warmth. Also because northern European buildings are generally built to keep you warm in winter, "indoors" is almost always warmer than outdoors, and until we got fancy lightbulbs the bluish light of daylight was only possible in the relative colder outdoors.
Though logically we should associate a red sunset with cold; whenever we're outside (in the north) to watch a sunset we're probably also having a fireplace (with it's matching yellow red colors) and wearing warmer clothes.
Also even today having something that is blue hot that is big enough for us to feel the warmth of it is rather rare, and at that temperature it's really blindingly bright anyway so we can't really look at it and notice it's blueness anwyay, so we can't build any intuition about how it's really actually hotter. One of the few things besides the sun (which is really far away) that is white to blue hot is welding sparks, but unless you're a welder yourself, you probably mostly see it outdoors from far away on a work site which if anything just strengthens the blue = outdoors = cold association.
I've always thought having green be part of either "warm" or "cold" colours was rather artificial, because green is literally not part of the black body spectrum. To me green has always been "neutral" on the colloquial "warm" to "cold" spectrum since green is the colour of foilage. So it's only "warm" when it's tinted yellow by the warm midday sun (and I guess because when sunlight shines through a leaf you see more of the yellow/red undertones of the plant tissue than when you see the light reflecting off the top of a leaf which is more dense with chlorophyll), and "cold" when it's in the cold shade tinted by the more "cold" blue of indirect ambient sky light. And in the colder darker periods of the day it appears black anyway.
I've often wondered if people from tropical areas (at least before they were exposed to the European ideas about colours) would have almost the opposite idea. If the bluish light of daylight is always experienced together with high heat outdoors. And if your house is designed to keep the inside as cool as possible during the day, it's probably comparatively cold at night when the only source of light would be a small fire. And you would not have any deep association of the bluish white of snow and ice, because you might have never seen it up close unless you're mountain climbing or at all if you're nowhere near a tall mountain.
And since direct sunlight is more immediately painfully hot in the tropics; I'd assume the association would be stronger with brightness meaning hot and darkness meaning cold regardless of hue. And in many tropical areas the earth is pretty ochre yellow or rust red in colour so even in the shade the reflected light of any exposed dirt will make the shade less blue tinted than the less reflective dark brown dirt and the deeper blue-green leaves and pine trees of the north does.
@@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug You could see that in a famous brazilian 19th painter José Ferraz de Almeida Junior. He was known exactly beause what you're saying. Most of his painting are pretty rust red, and ochre yellow. One reason was the disponibility of the pigments,and the region he was born, Itu ( country city of São Paulo, that had more yellow sun, and red dust ).
How does this interact with redshifting/blueshifting (if at all), and with that hazy blue-ish effect you get at the edge of the horizon sometimes?
I always found myself on this channel 🎉
1:31 I thought it was Leonardo da Vinci who had come up with the idea of aerial perspective? That's what I was taught in art school, anyway - was that incorrect? EDIT: According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Although the use of aerial perspective has been known since antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci first used the term aerial perspective in his Treatise on Painting, in which he wrote: “Colours become weaker in proportion to their distance from the person who is looking at them.” -- I guess his notebooks just weren't widely available in the 18th century.
As far as I know da Vinci didn't distinguish certain hues (warm ones) becoming weaker with distance, which is the 18th century innovation in de Lairesse and Bardwell
For those who would like to know more about this, reading Michael Wilcox's "Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green, 2nd ed." will give you scientific insight as to how light waves behave once they encounter the paint film. Wilcox, as far as I know, is the first person to point out that the three primaries themselves are never pure but have a leaning, or "bias," towards a secondary. This means that all reds lean toward either violet or orange, yellows toward orange or green, blues toward green or violet. So we really ought to think of the painter's color wheel in terms of six primaries, not three. This will unlock color mixing, and it also encourages us to think about temperature when choosing which primary to work with in any given instance, as Gartside was beginning to understand in her writings ( 3:38 ).
The first to suggest paint mixing primaries leaning one way or another due to impurity is D'Aguilon in 1613 - Wilcox's work presents itself as scientific but his ideas are based in fundamental errors regarding how light works. MacEvoy on handprint (dot) com has a thorough and helpful critique of Wilcox. That being said, you are right that there is no logical reason to limit your mixing palette to three colors! There are great 4-, 5-, and 6-primary palettes for painters :)
@@ColorNerd1 Not sure if you have a video on Wilcox and MacEvoy in your library yet, but I would be extremely interested if you don't! Wilcox's tone is so convincing, and I don't specialize in this domain, so I never even thought to look for critiques!
I suppose pigment availability is a better color choice criteria than pigment flavor. (Comment for the algo!)
cvrious
I maybe didn't follow but would you say the concept of cool and warm color is a cultural made up conception or does it have any real meaning to say that cool colors recede? Or is it more about high croma colors are precieved to advance more? Thank you for very interesting videos!
It's mostly a cultural/theoretical thing to be taken with caution. Colour (hue, chroma, saturation, temperature) and subject contexts will make the difference. He explained that in the video when talking about the cool/warm sun.
"Cool colors recede" was sort of based in atmospheric perspective; distance does reduce the chroma of hues we call warm due to Rayleigh scattering filtering out more and more longer wavelengths as more and more atmosphere is between you and what you're looking at. MacEvoy also argues that the perception of color as warm or cool is related to our vision evolving to adapt under regular daylight CCT changes over the day. Warm light (light with a spectral bias toward long wavelengths) renders blues and greens duller, because blue and green objects have less light to reflect. My take is that the color theorists in the 18th century were on to something, but Hayter dividing the RYB wheel into warm/cool obfuscated the nature of color temperature for artists, by treating temperature as an abstract quality of hue, rather than an effect of the spectral bias of the light source.
What's cultural is the _meaning_ attached to the differences in color and color temperature. To give a simple example, in the West we associate white with purity and innocence, thus a bride wears white at her wedding because she's moving from inexperience into a more committed relationship than she had before, whereas in parts of Africa and East Asia, white is associated with death and worn at funerals, not weddings.
If I understand correct, there is no differense in how we percieve the colors (hue) red and blue as receeding or advancing forward towards the viewer as long as they are equally saturated?
This whole thing is ridiculous. It's not "cultural" - summer isn't blue to anyone on earth besides an eskimo, and even they see certain hues more often then. These arguments on pedantics are frustrating
The warm/cool colors theory is a scam.
big color, man. they've been operating in the shadows for a long time