Am I Getting Warmer?

Hey there,
I hope you’re having a great day! Perhaps the color theory you learned in grade school about color temperature is wrong. You don’t have to raise your hand, but . . .
how many of you thought that red, orange and yellow were warm colors while blue, green and purple were cool colors?

While those statements are true, they’re really just a very small snippet of color as a whole. Just one hue can vary across the spectrum. You can have a very cool red, that has had blue added to it, or a very warm red that has had yellow added.

Now let’s talk about undertone. In the two red colors mentioned above, the one with the yellow added displays a warm undertone and the one with blue exudes a cool undertone.

Enriched Color Wheel

Previously, I’ve talked about the color wheel. In as such, the standard color wheel has cool undertones. In the 1930’s, a painter named Robert Dorr decided that the standard color wheel was lacking in some way. A new color wheel enters the scene. A small amount of another primary color mixed with each of the other primary colors to increase the intensity. A little yellow was added to primary red and a little red was added to both yellow and blue.

This new color wheel is called the enriched color wheel or the double- primary wheel. This color wheel along with the standard color wheel are the basis for seasonal color theory (my favorite topic). I’m so excited to get to tell you this. Now you know all you need to know about color theory to understand seasonal color palettes. So guess what we get to talk about next time!