The Extremes of Color

When doing visual art such as painting or drawing, color is always something that is thought about with the utmost care. You want it to look exactly like the subject, don't you? But what if I were to tell you that sometimes you should lean one way or the other on the color spectrum. Yes, I am saying to do a piece entirely in cool or warm colors.

Now, I did not invent this technique, as I was not alive thousands of years ago, but I notice that it sometimes gets passed off as lazy. Many artists take hours to craft the color within their pieces as everything has complex color structures, but sometimes nice shades of cool or warm tones may make the piece work properly. If I am painting a scene at night, my color choices will most likely be mostly cool, so why not go all the way and make it ALL cool colors. Throw in those purples and blues to fully capture the night.

Warm colors alone can cover a lot of different scenes and subjects. You can do scenes during the day, trees, lights, rooms, and many other things exclusively in warm colors without even touching a blue. Let the paint become your fire, let it light up the canvas through yellows and oranges. Warm colors can either depict excruciating hotness, or comfortable warmth during the cold winter nights.

Now again, I am saying nothing that is new knowledge, since you probably already know the color wheel and the uses for specific colors, so what I am saying is nothing crucial, but it still has a plethora of uses. For those little throw away sketches you drew, slap a cool, light foreground on top with an even cooler, darker, background. The little throwaway sketch can now be interpreted as a “finalized piece.” Monotone pieces are incredibly fun and rewarding to make, so why not try to work in an extreme yourself?