Following some recent portrait exercises, Lorraine commented: “These were very interesting exercises for me as I realized that I mainly use a warm palette for all my paintings.”
Lorraine’s comments set me thinking generally about the way I paint and it’s clear that I gravitate to cool-variant colours and I build most of my paintings with them…adding warm at the end as an accent.
For example, circling around the primaries, I tend more often to use cooler variants, particularly with reds and yellows:
| Primary Color | Warmer Version | Cooler Version |
| Red | Cadmium Red | Alizarin Crimson |
| Yellow | Cadmium Yellow | Lemon Yellow |
| Blue | Cerulean | Ultramarine |
This certainly has served me well with portraits (where skin tones invariably contain a little blue) and I don’t really change my approach with other subjects….except perhaps for some florals.
Maybe it’s because cool colours are a little more subtle and less in-your-face. Perhaps not as joyful, however they keep your interest and, along with this some degradation and variations, leave something to be dwelt upon. It’s always possible to highlight in warm onto a cool base and I’m not sure that is the case visa-versa. Experiment!!
Break-a-Brush!
David