Temperature Painting

IN THE SECOND PART OF HER SERIES, ATELIER TUTOR JULIETTE ARISTIDES EXPLAINS HOW USING TWO COLOURS CAN HELP YOU MASTER WARM AND COOL IN YOUR PAINTINGS.

- Juliette Aristides

As a student, I spent many years learning to draw before transitioning to grisaille painting. Yet after only a year of working in black and white, we were given a full high-chroma palette; it felt like I had been on a raw food diet only to be thrown into a milk chocolate fondu fountain. It was a mystery to me why we didn’t gradually transition through a limited colour palette. My teacher’s answer surprised me. He said: “Because it’s harder.”

How could it be more difficult to use two colours than 20? After wrestling with this, I realised it is not only harder, it’s impossible. Can you imagine painting the bright red of a tomato or the emerald green of a pepper if the only colours on your palette are orange and blue? Yet, if your subject matter doesn’t have much high-intensity colour, it could lend itself perfectly to a simplified palette. It takes little to convey a full-colour painting. In fact, depending on the piece, two-colour painters can outperform those using a full palette, even when working from the life model. The limitations of a few colours provides a freedom and mastery; it’s not what you have but how you use it.

CHANGING LIGHT 

Colour painting, regardless of your palette choices, is a translation of nature, not a direct transcription; a point more quickly understood in warm/cool painting than with a full palette. There are infinite variations of colour in nature and they shift under natural light and translucency.