Friday, February 1, 2013

Split Palette with Warm/Cool Primaries

These are two slightly different palettes with 2 of each primary, one warm and one cool.  The idea is that if you want clean, clear colors do NOT cross the black line when mixing primaries (i.e. mix a warm red with a warm yellow to get a bright orange).  Alternately, for variety, shadows, darks, more neutral colors, DO cross the line when mixing two primaries (i.e. mix a cool blue with a warm red).  


This first one shows how I changed the primary colors to get cleaner brighter mixtures of orange, green and purples.  I marked the ones I prefer with an "X"



This next one is just show an example of some of the warm and cool primaries that I have in my collection.



The last one is another warm/cool split primary palette, this time using a different cool yellow and a different cool red.  Just to compare more mixes with what I did with the first page above.  In this color wheel the yellow is Cadmium Lemon which is a lovely color by I don't like the fact it is opaque (although the greens are very nice).

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks to your examples I finally understand why and when to cross the black lines with cool and warm primaries in my palet. I had read an article about this but your article cleared up the great time saver of this proceedure. I am moving to acrylics and the color theory still applies I think.

Richard Groleau