The role of cool and warm colors

The warmth and coldness of color mainly refers to the total impression of color structure in hue.

When we observe the colors of objects, we usually call some colors cool and others warm, which is based on physical, physiological, psychological and color appearance. These comprehensive factors depend on people's experience of social life and their feelings of association, so the positioning of color in cold and warm is a hypothetical concept, and only by comparison can its richness be determined.

For example, when we see blue, green and blue, we often associate them with ice, snow, ocean and blue sky, and have a cold psychological feeling. Usually, we define these colors as cool colors, and when we see orange, red and warm yellow, we think of warm sunshine, fire and summer, which produces warm psychological effects, so we call them warm colors. Cold and warm is originally the human body's feeling of external temperature, but due to people's long-term contact with objective things in nature and the accumulation of life experience, when we see a certain color, we will have a kind of subconscious association in vision and psychology, resulting in cold or warm conditioned reflex. In this way, the "warmth and coldness of color" comes from painting chromatics, and after it is applied to the actual visual picture, it constitutes the "warmth and coldness" of perceptible color.

Using cold and warm to define the color contrast between objects and images is also a contrast between colors in the color structure relationship. In the contrast, a unified tone of the picture is formed, and a tone is constructed in the unified tone of the picture. In the color circle below, the colorist divides the typical color of 10 tone on the color circle into two corresponding color regions, a warm color region and a cool color region (see Figure 6).

In our research on color painting, it is one of the most important topics to analyze and study the law of color change. The relationship between cold and warm and its changes are everywhere in nature. Cold and warm are the unity of opposites. Without warmth, there is no cold, and without cold, there is no warmth. But the warmth and coldness of color is not absolute, but relative. When we use color to sketch, we can't simply use the cold and warm colors on the color wheel to divide. Contrast the warmth and coldness of colors on the screen. Sometimes yellow is warm for cyan, but it is colder than vermilion. In the actual color sketch, we must use the changing law of temperature flexibly, instead of mechanically and simply applying some patterns.