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
