Pop n' Glow: Waking Up Your Paintwork With Color

Introduction

We’ve all seen them — those exquisite paintjobs that are ablaze with a luminosity and glow that just seem to radiate from within. They’re “lit up” with color and it’s glorious! What’s more, they have a “cleanliness” to their colors, a clarity that furthers the overall impression so beautifully and makes the piece really stand out as only great paintwork can do. They also have a depth, a richness that draws you in, enticing your eye and inspiring your senses. These pieces own their space, don’t they? They snatch your heart and hold it, capturing your imagination and wowing you with their singular beauty. And this effect can be made to be so subtle and sublime, too, it doesn’t have to be “in your face,” existing on a spectrum of possibility. Indeed, even the darkest black bay or most monochromatic chestnut can be made to glow with smart color strategy!

Even more though, these pieces also seem more realistic because they better match life’s coloration and the impression of a healthy “clear” coat. The artist just seemed to be able to target those authentic colors so closely that our brain suspends disbelief and for a moment, becomes convinced we’re looking at a real horse.

So how do these artists do this? How do they create paintwork that “pops” so beautifully while still remaining realistic? How do they achieve that glow without looking like carnival paint? What do they do to inject luminosity and cleanliness into the pigments without looking day-glo? Welp, it’s all in the colors you choose to use in your mixes and a keen understanding of color theory! That’s the trick, in a nutshell! So to learn how we, too, can create such splendid paintjobs, let’s talk about this powerful approach to kick our own work up a notch or two! Let’s go!…

Put White To Sleep

It’s an easy assumption: Just use white to lighten a pigment. This is called “tinting,” adding white to a color to lighten its value. However, when it comes to horse color, this is often exactly the wrong way to lighten many horse colors like bay, chestnut, black, and other clear coats. Why? Because the use of too much white in these colors creates an over-tinted, “powder puff” effect that sucks all the glow and luminosity out of the paintwork. Unless you use it very carefully then, white is the luminosity-killer so if the color you’re painting isn’t white-based, veer from white to lighten it. Examples of white-based coats are many dilutes and dapple grey. Why are they white-based? Because whites are usually needed to provide some body, some “opacity oomph,” to a “parent” transparent color. For example, for silver dapple, we often use Raw Umber and Burnt Umber and blacks as the parent colors, but we need a touch of white to add opacity to them since they tend to be so transparent out of the tube. Grulla is another example of a white-based color only because the parent colors you generally use — Raw Umber and Burnt Umber and blacks — are so transparent. Pearl, champagne, isabella, and others are also examples of white-based colors for this reason. So in these white-based colors, you can use whites to lighten your colors, albeit strategically and carefully to avoid a powder puff effect. 

But just as much, too much white can over-cool a color which can veer it away from what your reference is telling you to do. You can use a warm white such as Antique White, or make one yourself by adding a gold or brown, but just be careful that the warming agent doesn’t also cause you to veer away from what your reference requires. Indeed, in this way, tinting can be tricky business! Infusing white into your pigments is always a delicate balancing act. So overall, use white just enough to add opacity oomph to your transparent pigments and if you go beyond that to add a highlight, be tactical and cautious. We don’t want to cool things down too much or lighten things too much beyond our reference, or powder-puff our paintjob into stylization.

Now as for the clear coats, they’re often a different story! We’ll get to them in a bit, but suffice to say, surprisingly, you can use white to add that opacity oomph to them, too, since many of those parent colors are transparent as well. But be conservative here — use just enough white to add opacity to the pigments and no more or you’ll end up with a powder-puff bay or chestnut or black. But this is often how you achieve those creamy chestnuts and bays, adding some sort of tinting pigment to your parent colors. You can also add a bit of “pop” to a black this way by giving your black shading a “place to go” if you start with a charcoal instead of a straight black. And it doesn’t have to be white per se — it could be a grey, taupe, unbleached titanium, buff, etc. Just something with white in it.

Point being, don’t automatically reach for the white when you want to lighten a pigment. White definitely has its place and it’s a powerful partner for your paintwork, absolutely, but it needs to be wielded with a keen understanding of color theory. Generally speaking then, white is better used as an opacity-enhancer and tinting-agent rather than as a go-to for adding highlights or glow, especially on those clear coats. There are other colors that do a better job at that while avoiding the powder-puff effect, which we’ll discuss in a mo’.

Give Black A Nap

Likes whites, blacks have their place on our palette, too. Indeed, they can be essential for certain colors such as dapple greys, buckskins, grullas, and bays, for example. But the trick with straight black is this: It kills color. It doesn’t just darken them…it kills them. What does that mean? Well, it erases their luminosity, saturation, and glow, and it can muddy up a color faster than just about anything. It just kills the nature of a color outright. And it’s powerful stuff — just a dab can kill in a heartbeat. So use blacks with tremendous caution and only with certain colors if you’re wanting to darken a color. Why’s that? Because blacks can also shift colors towards green or blue since many blacks are biased in that direction. Like try to mix Ivory Black with a yellow and you get a greenish mud, definitely not what you want for your golden, glowing palomino or rich, dusty buckskin! Indeed, it’s why that transition between the black leg and the buckskin body can turn green in inexperienced hands. 

Different blacks also have different properties. For instance, Ivory Black is very transparent and has a blue base whereas Mars Black is more opaque and has a brown base (it’s also very powerful in a mix). Likewise Bone Black is a more opaque, very warm black that’s brown-based (being made from the charred bones of animals) while Lamp Black is more transparent and cool blue toned (it was originally made by collecting the soot from oil lamps). Then there's the cool Perylene Black with a very strong green base and, finally, Carbon Black (formed by the partial combustion of natural gas) which is the most opaque, strongest black and is probably the most neutral black out there. So with this in mind, not every black is the ideal one for your mix, depending on your colors. Like you don’t want to mix blue blacks with yellows or you’ll get greens, for instance.

But if we want more control in our black use, what do we do? Well, we use color theory to learn how to make our own black, something we can have more control over. Really, if we can make our own blacks, we can shift it easier in any direction so it jives well with our mixes. So how do we make blacks? Easy! A common way to make a black is to mix a dark cool blue like Ultramarine Blue with a warm brown like Burnt Umber. This creates a rich, deep black that allows us to adjust the temperature as needed. Other options are Prussian Blue and Burnt Sienna or Red Oxide or Alizarin Crimson or Terra Rosa or Burnt Umber again. In essence, you mix a deep blue with a reddish brown and boom…you have a black you can adjust. But also try blues with Raw Umber for a very different type of useful black that comes in handy in certain situations. Another common way to make a black, a more neutral, natural one, is to mix your primary colors — red, yellow, and blue — together (not in equal portions, mind you, go easy on the yellow). For a more novel way though, try Phthalo Green and Quinacridone Violet or Alizarin Crimson.

So the takeaway here is this: Don’t necessarily reach for blacks if you wish to darken your colors as it can kill those colors or shift them well away from your intentions. But if you do reach for them, know the properties of the black you reach for when considering your mix. What’s more, learn how to mix your own blacks for maximum adaptability that’ll really help your palette enrich and glow up.

Wake Up, Pigment! Breakfast Is Ready!

So if white and black aren’t always the best answers to our problem, what do we do instead? In other words and right to the point, how do we brighten our browns without white and how do we darken them without black? And that’s the $64 question right there so let’s get right to it!

Let’s say you’re painting a chestnut, or a palomino, or a bay. How do we wake up those colors without using white? Well, we use primary colors and secondary colors, that’s how! We use yellows, reds, and oranges to add power to the paintwork, highlights to the high points, and glow to the pigments. I won’t endorse the use of Cadmium colors as they’re toxic (use with caution and follow all recommended precautions!), but that’s the intensity you need to go for when finding substitutes. Like real yellows, reds, and oranges…the ones that make your eyes melt. Why? Because they provide the brightness necessary to wake up the glow as a high note and give you plenty of room to dampen them down or cleanly morph them within mixes. Indeed, you’ll find these colors immensely useful for lots of mixes if you know color theory! Indispensable! Just be sure to get a cool and warm version of each, like a warm yellow leans towards the reds such as Quinacridone Gold, Hansa Yellow Deep, Cadmium Yellow Deep Hue (the hue is different from real cadmium, being the nontoxic substitute) and a cool yellow, which leans towards the greens, like Lemon Yellow, Hansa Yellow, Nickel Azo Yellow, etc., for instance. A warm red leans towards the yellow and orange end of the spectrum while a cool red leans into the blue and purple end, for example. But lastly, orange is a lot harder to categorize as a warm or a cool color but very generally speaking, a cooler orange leans into the yellows while a warmer orange leans into the reds.

Now you can use these colors in mixes in any number of ways to get the target colors you need, and being so bright, they give you a lot of “room to work,” a lot more possibilities to mix towards. Like let’s take that chestnut example — let’s say your basic red chestnut — what would we use to create a highlight color? Well, we could use a warm yellow and a warm red and mix them with Burnt Sienna or Red Oxide for a highlighter with loads of pop. Bam! Or for a palomino, ease up on the red and lean more into the yellow. Whammo! Or for a bay, lean more into the oranges and reds or golds. Bang! The point is, if you want to maintain the clarity of your colors, you have to use clear, clean colors to brighten them. So think about how reds, yellows, and oranges factor into your target colors to get the various hues you need within mixes, don’t just think about your earth tones or what we’d call “horse colors.” Think beyond the browns! Just be careful of how the temperatures mix so you don’t inadvertently create an unintended tone. Like mixing the cool Nickel Azo Yellow with the cool Raw Umber will yield a greenish shade which isn’t suitable for most coat colors (but may be very useful for hoof color, palmar foot coloring, or dirt staining — every color has its place). But you know, try it anyway! You can always warm it up with a red for a lovely kind of unique brown.

Okay, then that said…how do we darken our browns without using black? Easy…color theory! Or more specifically, complementary and tertiary mixes! Just as those bright colors wake up our palette, knowing how to mix complementary and tertiary mixes helps us to slumber certain colors. The main point here though is this: You get these dampened colors through mixing, that’s the key. Sure, you might find a suitable dark color straight from the tube at times, but chances are, you’ll have to mix one most of the time. The good news is that a host of browns are easy to make with all sorts of color mixes so you have a lot of adaptability at your fingertips in this! So say, for that red chestnut, how do we create a shade color without using black? Well, take your Burnt Sienna or Red Oxide and mix in a complementary color to its red base, something like Ultramarine or Prussian Blue, just a bit, just enough to darken it, not overpower it otherwise you’ll create a black. But hit the right proportion, and that’ll create a lovely dark brown. Or for a variation, try Pthalo Green or Hooker’s Green for a cooler brown, more like a Raw Umber. Or even if you mix oranges and blues, you’ll create a host of lovely dark browns. This also works great for bays, this using blues and greens to create dark browns, so try it! But again, be mindful of your color temperatures to avoid creating mud, so mix cool with cool and warm with warm to avoid creating a muddy brown. When you start mixing together cool and warm is when you tend to get your muddy colors.

Now for that palomino we need to use “kin” colors, or darker colors in the same family as our base color of medium gold. So for example, take Raw Sienna and deepen it with a warm brown like Burnt Umber or Van Dyke Brown. You can mix it with Raw Umber, but that might be too cool and it’ll need a bit of warming up with some Burnt Sienna or Red Oxide or Terra Rosa. Or you can mix up a warm brown and mix it with that gold to get a gorgeous deep gold for your shading. The point is, black will turn that yellow green which we want to avoid so use dark browns instead as a darkening agent.

So how to lighten a brown without using white? If you notice, when you mix white into a brown, you get a taupe, beige, grey, or even a greige rather than a lightened brown. That’s the tinting power of white at work, something we want to steer away from if we want to lighten our browns. So to do that, think about using yellows, oranges, and reds instead to “pop” the color just like you did for highlights. Like adding a warm yellow to Burnt Umber renders a lovely warm lighter brown, for example. Or adding a red to Burnt Sienna really cranks it up a notch, or adding an orange to Terra Rosa makes that color really rev up more. The point is, think about using color rather than white to lighten your browns and you’ll find that your results are often much more on target and much more glowing.

Now granted, there will be times when that touch of white or touch of black will be called for to match a color or to give some opacity oomph to your mix. If that’s the case — do it. There are no real hard and fast rules with color and Nature because, to Nature, color is just color! Really, as long as you’ve matched your color, that’s all that really counts!

Taking On The Day

Now if you want to dampen your whites for markings and patterns for a more natural look, opt away from using blacks to darken them as you’ll get greys and that doesn’t quite work. Instead, opt instead on using taupes, greiges, beiges, or even a bit of raw sienna into your whites to tame them down. You want to catch that warmth of the underlying flesh in a sense, and the reds coming from the tan component can do that for you. What you want is a “dirty white,” not a grey or a beige or a tan, so just a touch of a “browning” agent will do.

On that note, don’t knock mud! Muddy colors can be magical and just the ticket to the color needed! Remember, to Nature, color is just color! And so we should have no prejudices, either. Indeed, we can think of classic silver dapple and champagne, even mushroom and some pearls, as specialized mud, and the same can be said of some liver chestnuts and brown bays. Mud can also be instrumental for the palmar feet, hooves, chestnuts, and dirt staining. So know how to mix an effective mud as well because muddy colors are found on horses a lot more than we think at first glance!

Now for flesh colors for pinking, they run the gamut because of individual variation and the level of exertion the horse is enduring which would get the blood more to the surface. Even the temperature that day can affect how pronounced pinking is as can how short the coat is, whether naturally shed or clipped. So pay attention to the situational details when considering pinking. Any which way, some handy ways to mix up flesh tones are at our easy disposal. A quick way is to mix Burnt Sienna with Titanium White for a basic “flesh” color. You can add in a bit of reds or yellows, even oranges, to shift it any direction you want. You can mauve it up with a touch of brown, too, even a teensy touch of blue can spin it into the necessary direction. What you want to do is avoid a flesh tone that’s too-yellow, too-orange, or even too-red. Flesh has to be within the “flesh bubble” to read right, so practice mixing it if needed. Likewise, avoid pinking that’s “too hot” as in too pronounced for the situation depicted by the sculpture; pinking is often best when it’s on the subtle side. However, as you know, on the muzzle and on the “parts” pinking can be more intense so don’t be overly timid there. Now if you’d like to mix up your flesh tones from primary colors, that’s fun and easy to do, and gives you lots of control in terms of manipulating the temperature and tone. So the trick is to create a starter hue, usually a peach color. We do this by mixing a red and a yellow together with a white. You can add more red for a warmer flesh or more yellow for a cooler flesh. If you want to lighten it, add white (flesh is one of those colors that’s best lightened with white rather than another color) and if you want to darken it, add a touch of burnt sienna or a teeny bit of blue. Or for another mix, try Burnt Umber, Titanium White, a warm yellow, a warm red, and a warm blue. To lighten it, add white and yellow or to darken it, use Burnt Umber and blues. Adding in more reds and yellows will make the flesh color warmer while veering towards the blues will cool it down.

Then for pigmented colors for dark skin, think about mixing blacks with taupes, or with browns and whites to create an array of greiges and charcoals. Or simply take your homemade black mixture and adjust it with a touch of white to grey it up a snidge. See the thing is, if we base our dark skin on a dark greige or charcoal, we have “room” to paint in shadows with black for eyelids, the lip line, inside the nostrils, etc. whereas if we used just straight black, we wouldn’t have that opportunity to add depth and detail. And dark skin can either be a warm charcoal or a cool charcoal, depending on the individual and coat color, so pay attention to its temperature, too.

Now certain colors like champagne have a purply-greige thing going on with their skin, a light grey-brown with a lavender cast. This can be tricky to mix to stay on target, but think about adding a bit of brown and a touch of red and blue or just straight up purple to your grey mix to hit it.  Likewise, many double dilutes like isabella have a darkish brownish pink or brownish peach skin which is easy to make by mixing your flesh tones with a touch of browns to deepen it a snidge. These mixes can also be adjusted for temperature as needed as individual variation in that department can play a part in that color story, too.

Now hooves can be a rather surprising source of color use! They really aren’t just black and white to make grey for dark ones, or “shell” color for pale ones. There’s often a lot more going on with them if we really pick them apart. Like look for greens, purples, blues, and browns in dark hooves and greiges, golds, rusts, greys, and browns in pale hooves. Hooves can also shift from warm to cool on the same hoof or between feet and horses, so look for that aspect, too. So say, for dark hooves, start with a basic grey and then add in necessary colors to hit your target. For instance, take a black and a white, and mix them together then paint your hoof. Now add a touch of a yellow or gold to a portion of that mix to green it up a bit to add some shading and color shifting to that hoof. Then consider browner mixes, blacker mixes, and bluer mixes on the same hoof, melding it all together with careful brushwork. In the end, your hoof will have a lot more depth and believability than simply being painted in just a black and white series of greys. As for pale hooves, you can mix Titanium White, Burnt Sienna, and Raw Sienna together for a basic “shell” color. Then make adjustments by adding in various colors to create those subtle tonal shifts like adding in browns, greys, blues, yellows, even oranges and greens, all of which work together to add complexity and depth to your pale hooves.

Conclusion

See, the options and possibilities are wide open when you’re able to paint beyond whites and blacks! When you understand color theory, in particular, a host of beautiful browns, greys, golds, peaches, fleshes, tans, rusts, and other horsey colors are all within your grasp when you work beyond white and black, so stretch for that gold ring! Using color to wake up color isn’t only highly effective with more beautiful results, but it’s also fun and fascinating, making your painting experience that much more interesting and exploratory. Mixing paint becomes a series of fun discoveries in a sense, and you’ll soon find your favorite mixes for certain things like hooves, palmar feet, chestnuts, pinking, etc. (Recommended reading: A Cacophony Of Color: The Magic Of Unlikely Pigments)

And make no mistake, having a varied portfolio can be important as well as fun. Like when all your pale hooves look exactly the same, that kind of habit veers away from realism, doesn’t it? Each pale hoof is different, and so should be our painted feet. Or when all our pinking is the same or when all our bays are carbon copies, not only are we falling short of our own potential, we’re also missing out on a fuller expression of reality with all its cool options. If we want to capture that genii in a bottle then, we have to not only See color in life but we have to know how to manipulate it on our palettes, too, and then — and only then — can we come closer to reality in our paintwork. 

It’s also so exciting to work from an inspiring reference and then be able to match all those colors much more precisely! Our confidence builds, our moxie increases, our inspirations compound, and we stretch ourselves ever further in our skillsets and expectations, allowing us to progress a lot faster and more effectively. In other words, knowing how to use color not only improves our paintwork, it accelerates our improvement in unexpected ways as only it can. It feeds our motivations and inspirations with a hefty dose of curiosity and excitement and gives us the tools to realize our visions with more authority and authenticity. If there was ever a way to wake up our painting skills, effective color use would be it! So get those colors out of their proverbial bed and get them fed a great breakfast of know-how then put them to work — we can’t wait to see your bright-eyed and bushy-tailed colors in action, full of glow and gorgeousness!

“All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.”

— Marc Chagall

Pop n' Glow: Waking Up Your Paintwork With Color

Fire And Ice: The Power Of a Warm And Cool Palette

Introduction 

Arbitrarily painting model horses is one thing and matching an actual coat color in paint is quite another. See, I had always simply painted happenstance before — I just took a cue from a reference and painted “inspired by it” rather than literally from it. In this way, I sorta painted on the fly. It was interpretive, it was loose, it was loosey goosey, and it was just what I did. Lemme tell ya though, once you start painting literally, once you have to actually match a real coat color for color, everything changes. But it changes for the better, in a big way, especially if you’re retraining your Eye. So to say I was caught off guard by this unexpected lesson is an understatement, but to say I was stunned is simply being at a loss for words! I was flabbergasted! Why? Because a huge revelation was found in this matchy-matchy exploration, one that has shifted not only the way I paint but the way I perceive horse color forever. So in the spirit of spreading the love, let’s talk about this discovery because it may be something you find immensely curious and helpful, too! So let’s just jump right in!… 

The Illumination 

It’s been the same mantra I’ve heard over and over again in classes, workshops, and seminars during my formative arting years: Pick either a warm palette or cool palette to paint with and stick with it because it makes for a more cohesive, better painting. But this just never sat well with me, and for reasons I couldn’t ever put a finger on. It just didn’t seem right to my mind but contrived and forced, artificial, even arbitrary. I didn’t buy into it. Yet after over thirty years of arting later, I finally understand why I didn’t agree: Nature just doesn’t work that way! No, Nature doesn’t pick a warm or cool palette to colorize anything — it mixes them up! Color is just color! It doesn’t care one wit about color harmonies and it’s been such a revelation to realize that I don’t have to either! 

How did I finally come to this realization? Why, it was through Heather Bullach’s online painting classes were we worked to match a real-life coat color in oil paint because when you have to nail your target reference spot on, the equation totally flips. It just forces certain issues to the fore and demands a new way of interpreting what you’re doing, and in that new relationship with color, revelations are born. How so? Well, needs must, right? That’s to say, needing to pinpoint specific hues using color theory quickly revealed that I couldn’t do that properly unless I factored in both warm and cool colors on the same horse. I discovered that in Nature there was no such thing as a warm or cool palette — there was just color — and Nature plays around with it as a child plays with tinker toys, interchangeably and eagerly. And I should, too! Enlightenment! 

If I was to paint realistically then, I had to use color realistically, too. I had to dump arbitrary human rules to instead adopt Nature’s broader example of using both warm and cool colors on my horse. Once this was revealed, I soon found that nearly all horse color is indeed a combination of both warm and cool. Now, yes, there are exceptions, of course. Nature is Nature after all. Even so, the takeaway here is that this warm and cool combination is far more common than we might think because once you start looking for it, you find it darn near everywhere. Even a grey or a grulla can be a combination! The shifts can be bold or subtle and everything in between, too, and can shift in the same body region or across regions — it’s a free for all out there! 

Overall then, there are no real rules when it comes to color use and Nature — Nature just does what it does. And so must I, taking my cue from unexpected, always-surprising, always variable, and always right Nature. Elation! 

Just what is “Warm” And “Cool”? 

So what do we mean when we speak of a “warm” or “cool” color? Well, warm colors such as reds, oranges, yellows, golds, and rusts will “warm up” a mixture. It’ll add a tone to it that “heats” it up. On the other hand, cool colors such as blues, purples, and greens will “cool down” a mixture by just adding a “chillier” tone. So a warm palette really leans into the yellows, oranges, and red undertones, one half of the color wheel, while a cool palette leans into blue, green, or purple undertones, the other half of the color wheel. 

But it’s not as simple as the presence or absence of reds, yellows, oranges, golds, and rusts which would “warm up” a mixture. Why? Because each of those colors has their own variety of warm and cool tones! Yes — there is such a thing as a cool red and a warm red! For instance, a cool red is Alizarin Crimson with its blue undertone while a warm red is Cadmium Red with its orange undertone. Generally speaking then, cool reds lean into the purple and blue spectrum and away from the yellows, rusts, and oranges while warm reds tend to be the opposite. Likewise, cool yellows tend to lean into the green undertone while warm yellows lean into the orange undertone. For instance, Hansa Yellow is a good example of a cool yellow while Cadmium Yellow Deep is an example of a warm yellow. Even blue has its warm and cool counterparts. For instance, Ultramarine Blue is often thought of as a warm blue with its purple leanings (and therefore reds) while Phthalo Blue can be considered a cool blue as it leans into the greens more (but more on the blues later). 

Likewise, whites and blacks have their warm and cool counterparts which can make a big difference in our mixtures, too. For instance, Zinc White is a good example of a cool white while Antique White is a warm white with a tan bias. Curiously, Titanium White is more neutral, making it an ideal white for just about any palette. Similarly, Ivory Black with its blue undertone is an example of a cool black while Mars Black is more of a warm black with its brown (red) undertone. 

And make no mistake, the warm and cool colors on our palette matters, and matters big time. Indeed, our color mixes can be radically changed simply by switching them out, warmth and cooling being that powerful. Indeed, not accounting for the “temperature” of a color is often why we miss our target colors outright or misinterpret a color wheel entirely. It can be why we’re constantly fighting our mixtures, never quite pinpointing our references as we wish or even inadvertently creating “mud.” It’s not that what we’re doing is intrinsically wrong, it’s probably because we aren’t accounting for the temperature of the colors we’re mixing together. In this light, it can be a good idea to have both a warm and cool counterpart of our primaries in our paint kit to better coordinate our mixes as needed. In other words, have a warm and cool red, a warm and cool yellow, and a warm and cool blue so we can accommodate temperature better as we mix colors. Also know the temperature of your horsey colors, often referred to as "earth colors" in painting circles. And, of course, whites and blacks have their cool and warm counterparts as do the greys. Bone black is a warm black with a brown undertone, for example, whereas Lamp Black is a cool black with a blue undertone. As for grey, Payne's Grey is a cool grey with a bluish cast whereas Portland Warm Grey is a taupe-like warm grey. You can even create a lovely neutral grey mixing Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Umber, and Titanium White. For variations, switch out with Raw Umber for a cooler "not red" grey or add in Burnt Sienna or Indian Red for a more purple cast. You can also make grey from complements such as mixing Lemon Yellow with Dioxazine Purple and Titanium White for a lovely taupeish grey color. Or mix Raw Umber and Burnt Umber together for a nice basic more neutral brown. Now as for white, it should be noted that paints made with linseed oil tend to have a warmer undertone whereas paints made with safflower oil tend to be cooler, both of which directly affect the undertones of our whites.

Ultimately then, what does this mean? That we need to refine our Eye to perceive the warmth and coolness of the colors we see in our references, on our palette, and in our paintjob. Indeed, the better we can perceive these temperature shifts, the closer we’ll nail our target colors, and with greater clarity, ease, and depth. 

Nevertheless, our references, our palette, and our paintjob entail three different levels of perception that need careful training to sync so we can match our desired colors between them. This is because we can look at things in our references, our palette, and our paintjob, but the moment we look away, we have to rely on memory and it’s here that our brain can inadvertently shift tones as it processes a new view, especially when it comes to the temperature of a color. What’s a workaround? When we mix colors with our palette knife, hold that knife right up to the reference to check both its hue and its temperature side-by-side, up close and personal. That side-by-side comparison is important! Why? Because it’s amazing how our brain can misinterpret things when it looks away and has to reprocess a new view. But practice at this and we’ll soon train our Eye to better hone in on and mentally retain the necessary information of our target colors more easily. 

Another thing we’re working against is an inherent bias in our art form for reds with an accompanying strong bias against the “not reds,” the cool colors. It makes some sense though when it comes to horse colors, right? Our horses aren’t colored in blues, purples, and greens. They aren’t macaws or tropical fish! Nope, they’re shades of reds, rusts, golds, yellows, peaches, browns, tans and taupes, blacks, greys, and whites...that sorta thing. Even so though, Nature has a much bigger color story to tell! If we look closely then, we find that it offers up those “not reds” as cool variations of our horsey colors whether in their coats, their manes, tails, and feathers, their hooves, their palmar feet, their chestnuts, their eyes, their teeth and tongue, and lots of other places on the body. So unless we perceive and duplicate this fuller color story, not only will our portfolio be limited, but we’ll fail to fully explore all the wonderful options laid out before us that adds so much more interest, authenticity, and realism to our work. 

For example, we really lean into Burnt Umber (warm brown) but shirk from Raw Umber (cool brown), interpreting it as “too green.” It really isn’t green though per se, it’s just not red. It’s very much a cool brown. We’re so biased towards red though, we literally perceive anything “not red” as greenish or bluish. But here’s the thing, if we’re paying attention to Nature’s color story, these “not reds” are equally important and have as much to offer our palette as any warm color. For example, dark hooves and chestnuts can be in the cooler spectrum and some grey skin can be based on cool violet. Many horse colors also require a cooler temperature in part or in whole, such as some silvers, mushroom, champagnes, and liver chestnuts. 

For another example, we really veer towards Indian Yellow, a warm yellow, but careen away from Nickel Azo Yellow, a cool “green” yellow. Yet a cool yellow has a lot of great uses, producing a whole spectrum of interesting golds that can be handy for certain palominos, buckskins, duns, and pale chestnuts. Like I used Nickel Azo Yellow to great effect on Itza Hoot and his sooty palomino color. Or for instance, we’ll miss our target for the bluish cast on a porcelain grey (grey on black) if we use warm Mars Black instead of cool Ivory Black. On that note, some colors are often a blend of cool grey-tans and warm grey-tans such as many grullas and foal colors. If we don’t know both our warm and cool colors though, we’re going to miss these target colors altogether. 

Putting It To Practice 

So pay attention to the bigger color story Nature presents! Don’t be afraid of color! Dive in! Whatever your reliable reference is telling you, try it! But how do we actually train our Eye to discern color better? How can we identify what color family a particular hue belongs to? How can we tell if an undertone is warm or cool? Why does any of this even matter? 

Well, for starters, a handy way to decipher color families in a reference is to upload it into a photo editing program (like Photoshop). Then use the color sampling tool to sample an area then pull up the color palette of that sample. Immediately, it’ll tell you exactly what color family that sample belongs to — easy as pie! Do this all over your reference from the pink muzzle to the hooves to the leg chestnuts to the palmar foot to all the areas on the body to the mane and tail. Even the dirt in the feathers. Everywhere. Soon you’ll get a much better idea just how much “non-horsey” colors play into what we do and especially their accompanying coolness and warmth. You’re going to be surprised! You’ll find that warm and cool colors play over like a patchwork quilt over the horse and that color families aren’t always of the expected sort! For instance, we can often find greens in dark hooves, violets in muzzle grey, purply hues in blues eyes, and mauves in muzzle pink, each of varying warmth and coolness. Perhaps one of the most surprising I’ve found was the cool green-based black horse! Now yes, we do have to take some of this with a grain of salt as we are talking about print and camera and screen color mechanics and limitations, but even so, it does knock us out of our conventional thinking all the same, and in a good way. When we open up our sensibilities to all the colors rather than just the strictly the horse colors, we not only diversify our palette to target our colors more efficiently, but we also become more sensitive to their temperature. Do this enough times then with many different chestnuts, many different bays, many different grullas, many different pearls, many different whatevers, and sooner than you think, your Eye will begin to train naturally on color families and their accompanying temperature. Indeed, make this color sampling a habit with your reference before you paint and you’ll build a reliable game plan before you even touch bristle to paint! 

Now does this actually mean we can use violets, greens, blues, purples, and yellow-greens in our mixes? Why, yes — yes it does. Go for it! If Nature uses it, why not you? But it also means that we should challenge any red bias we may have because clearly, Nature paints with far more colors. And again, why not you? (Recommended reading: A Cacophony Of Color: The Magic Of Unlikely Pigments.) If color sampling teaches us anything, it clearly shows us that Nature is far more varied in what it uses to colorize things. It also demonstrates that each similar color can actually be rather different. Like two greys, two bays, and two chestnuts may look similar, sure, but they also have differences that make each unique. So yeah, why not your paintwork? Why stick with the same ol’ formulas and habits that crank out the same ol’ color schemes when there are so many more options Nature offers us? When we can also improve the scope and depth of our portfolio to boot? Throw more colors in there! And in turn, learn how to use their temperatures to manipulate their use to the best effects. 

But how can we objectively determine if a particular color is warm or cool on our own? Well, just remember that warm colors lean into reds, yellows, and oranges while cool colors lean in to greens, blues, and on occasion, purples. So consider this…if you’re a bit uncertain as to the temperature of a certain color, hold a piece of white printer paper next to it as a neutral “key.” Now how does the color appear as compared to the white? Can you better see its temperature now? Like can you start to see its red, orange, and yellow leanings? Or its blue, green, and purple leanings? The white usually makes the undertone pop more to our Eye, so try this trick if you get stuck. 

Now as a good training exercise, take your tubes of paint and sort them according to their temperature. For instance, your reds, yellows, and oranges go in one pile and your blues, greens, purples, and violets go in another pile. Put your browns, whites, and blacks in those respective piles, too. Like Raw Umber goes into the cool pile while Burnt Umber goes into the warm pile, for example. Now take white note cards and put a swatch of each color on that card, next to its kin. For instance, put a swatch of all your greens on a card and compare them side to side. Their temperatures become a lot more obvious when they’re right next to each other for direct comparison, especially on a white notecard. Okay, now here’s where it gets interesting…now create subset piles of your warm and cool reds, warm and cool yellows, warm and cool blues, warm and cool browns, etc., using those color cards as guides. It’s really important to know which of your colors, especially your primaries, are cool and which are warm because their temperature will affect how they mix with the other colors quite a bit.

Now let’s talk about blue. Blue blue blue. See, there’s often disagreement over the temperatures of blues because it’s just a color that’s harder to define as a subset of warm and cool. Blue is a color that just is, in many ways. In truth though, most blues have a green slant to them with very few with a red slant, across media. For instance, Cobalt Blue is considered by many to be the most neutral bluest blue, depending on the manufacturer. Then in that light, Ultramarine Blue and Indanthrone Blue can be thought of as warm blues and Cerulean Blue and Phthalo Blue can be thought of as cool blues. But well…that’s open to debate when you get them down on white notecards as swatches! But a handy trick is to do a series of mixing swatches with a cool yellow — which blues create clear, vibrant greens? Those will be your cool blues. In turn, which will create dulled greens like army or olive or muddy greens? Those will be your warm blues. 

But why is all this so important? Well, for four major reasons. First, Seeing the temperatures of your colors helps you to both identify and nail your target hues more efficiently and confidently. Indeed, many horse coats are a patchwork of both cool and warm hues and so we really need to See those shifts to get them into our paintjob. Second, knowing the temperature of the colors on your palette helps you to avoid creating “deadened” muddy colors. Like if you mix a warm blue, say Ultramarine Blue, that has a bit of red in it, with a with a cool yellow, like Hansa Yellow Light, that has a bit of green in it, what do you think is going to happen between the red and green undertones? Yep, you’re going to generate a dulled, muddy color instead of a vibrant, clear color. (Instead then, it might have been better to use a warm yellow like Cadmium Yellow Deep that also has a bit of red in it.) So many artists find frustration with their color mixing because they inexplicably keep creating mud or colors not quite right for their target hues and blame their lack of skill, even their paint. Chances are though that’s it’s simply an unawareness of their colors’ temperatures that’s the culprit here. Really, get a handle on that, and your mixes will often magically fix themselves! Yet third, there’s nothing wrong with mud and dulled colors if that’s the target you’re going for! Mud can indeed be magic! For instance, leg chestnuts and the palmar foot benefit from these hues quite a bit as do some tones on the hooves. Some coat colors can also be muddy like mushroom and some silvers. In fact, champagne and grulla can be thought of as specialized kinds of mud. But we won’t know how to make effective mud if we don’t know how to manipulate color temperatures, will we? And what if we need a warm mud or a cool mud — do we know how to make those purposely? If we don’t know about color temperature, we’re simply working at a sharp disadvantage with purposeful mixing. And fourth, if we don’t understand temperature, we won’t be able to manipulate our pigments very well and that can greatly limit our palette. Like let’s say we have a green that’s more neutral like a Sage green. How would we warm it up while keeping it green? Well, we can add some warm Quinacridone Gold to it to lean it into warm yellow. How would we cool it down while keeping it green? We can add in some cool Prussian Blue to blue it up. In this way, we can turn any color into a host of purposeful new ones when we know how to mix them, opening up our palette to better explore the possibilities. Truly, when we can mix our own classic silver dapple tones and don’t need to reply on store-bought bottles, for example, we not only gain a lot of uniqueness, versatility, and adaptability, but we also gain something even more powerful — independence and autonomy in our paintwork. The moment that happens is when we’ll find that painting not only becomes a lot more fun and interesting, but our paintwork expands in scope and depth with all these new varied infusions. We also gain a lot more confidence and authority with our painting as we have the ability to target any color we wish more accurately. And who can argue with an authentically rendered reliable reference? 

Now in practical application within this paradigm, let’s take grulla, perhaps one of the hardest colors to conjure up for similar reasons. In this, grulla is based on a neutral “barn dove grey" but in certain areas it can be warmed up while on other areas it can be cooled down. How do we do that without killing it or veering off-track? Well, for our neutral “barn dove grey” we can start with Raw Sienna which is a “not red” brown with Titanium White, a more neutral white, with Ivory Black, a bluish black. Then to warm that up we can add in a red through Burnt Umber or to cool it down we can add more cool grey (Titanium White and Ivory Black). For variation, we can add in Purple Lake, a cool purple to give it that lavender cast some grullas have, or Van Dyke Brown, a warm flat brown, as needed. But if we didn’t know about color temperatures, we wouldn’t know how to do this very well and so probably end up frustrated and confused with not only our color mixes, but without even knowing the directions we had to go to nail all those varied colors in the first place. Indeed, grulla is a color easy to go off-track with because it can very quickly veer into the too cool (too grey) or too warm (too red) spectrum and therefore not read correctly. In short, if we don’t know about color temperature, our ability to capture certain colors — purposely, accurately, and confidently — is harder to achieve. For example, many tricky colors such as silvers, pearls, champagnes, mushroom, buckskins, and even many chestnuts rely on manipulating temperature to be truly successful. 

Conclusion 

What does all this boil down to? Simple. Color is complicated! But it’s complicated in a really interesting and useful way so if we know even a little bit of its secrets, we have a much better chance at pinpointing our target colors. 

And it’s all about those target colors, isn’t it? Truly, this means that nailing each of our targets can be critical for the overall color to read correctly. One shift in the wrong direction can throw everything off kilter! In other words, a good paintjob isn’t just piecemealed, but also the sum of its parts to look realistic. In order to achieve that happy end then, temperature should be factored in our mixing decisions since those warm and cool colors on our palette are key to matching our targets that add up to the whole. Really, if a color doesn’t seem to quite match the reference despite everything, it’s most likely not matching in its temperature. And this has to happen right from the get-go, too, right from our basecoat and first layers of paint! We have to be vigilant from brushstroke one especially for those trickier colors like grulla, champagne, pearl, and silver. 

But the biggest takeaway is that Nature paints with both warm and cool colors as it wishes. It doesn’t care one iota about color harmonies, that’s a human-made concept. To Nature, color is just color and so for us, that just means color is meant to be played with, rules are meant to be broken, and we’re supposed to have fun with our mixes in the spirit of curiosity and exploration. So take your cues from Nature — warm up to color and have a cool time with it! 

“The greatest masterpieces were once only pigments on a palette.” 

— Henry S. Hoskins

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