Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Warm and cool colors

This is an interesting lesson in the way that warm and cool colors can affect one another. 


In this first example (oil on canvas - 14"x11") I made the tee shirt pink, since that was the true color of the model's shirt. I asked her to keep her hat on as a nice change from hair. But no matter what I did, the skin colors seemed washed out. Too much pink.


Having nothing to lose, I decided to change the shirt to a cool color. I chose blue because there is some blue in the hat and because the background was already green. The only change I made in the face was to lighten some of the highlights. It is amazing to see the difference. Now, I may darken parts of the shirt to break up that large monotonous area of light blue.