Temperature Painting
Artists & Illustrators|October 2017

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
Temperature Painting

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.

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