Part III · Craft, genres and media · Chapter 21 of 31

Colour: hue, value and temperature

Every colour has three properties: hue (where it sits on the wheel), value (how light or dark it is) and chroma or saturation (how intense it is). Painters add a fourth working idea — temperature, warm or cool.

Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet — **Impression, Sunrise**, Claude Monet (1872). Oil on canvas. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Source: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh — **Sunflowers**, Vincent van Gogh (1888). Oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London. Source: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt — **The Kiss**, Gustav Klimt (1907–1908). Oil and gold leaf on canvas. Belvedere, Vienna. Source: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

The wheel and mixing

Paint mixing is subtractive: each pigment absorbs some light, so every mix is darker and usually duller than its parents. A limited palette of a warm and a cool version of each primary (for example cadmium red and alizarin, cadmium yellow and lemon, ultramarine and phthalo blue) lets you mix clean secondaries.

Complementary colours sit opposite each other on the wheel — red and green, blue and orange, yellow and violet. Side by side they make each other vibrate; mixed together they neutralise into rich greys and browns.

Temperature and harmony

Warm colours (reds, oranges, yellows) seem to advance; cool colours (blues, greens, violets) recede. In most daylight scenes the light is cool and the shadows warmer, or the reverse under warm lamplight. Getting this relationship right matters more than any single colour.

Simple harmonies: analogous (neighbours on the wheel), complementary, and a dominant colour with small accents of its complement. Monet's Impression, Sunrise works because the orange sun has almost the same value as the grey-blue sky.